Sustainability of post-disaster and post-conflict sheltering in Africa: What matters?

Africa is the continent with the highest number of displaced people due to wars, humanitarian crises, resource scarcity, and extreme climate events. Post-disaster and post-conflict (PDPC) sheltering always sets out with the best intention of being a temporary solution but, in most cases, it turns into a (semi-)permanent habitat. Yet, sustainability criteria are seldom accounted for in PDPC sheltering even when some of the largest 'temporary' camps now host the third generation and house as many people as a medium sized city. The lack of consideration regarding sustainability mostly boils down to the view of sheltering as a product rather than a process, with a focus that, to date, has been either too technical (e.g., "tents-in-a-bag", "plug-and-play-houses") or too social (e.g., by investigating personal and social needs) without harmonising the two. This article aims to address this issue and advance the global debate on shelter sustainability by tapping into interdisciplinary expertise on both the African context and refugees' sheltering. A gender-balanced panel of experts identified key features of promising solutions through an iterative approach starting from existing available designs. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was then applied to establish the weight of technical and sustainability (across the three pillars of economy, environment, and society) indicators across the identified key features. Results show that solutions which adopt natural materials and local building techniques score the highest across the economic, environmental, social, and technical dimensions. Furthermore, the relative importance of these macro-categories differs greatly across genders, with female experts assigning a significantly stronger weighting to social indicators and male experts to environmental indicators. This research sheds new light on the sustainability of sheltering in Africa and paves the way for further work in the area. (C) 2019 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.