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If you want a new roof and
you live near 0werri in Nigeria, your best course
is to visit the lepers of Uzuakoli. They make and
sell lightweight concrete tiles for less than the
price of corrugated iron.
Since the tiles are made
from local materials (cement, sand and chopped
fibre), the supply is reliable. Nigerians from Port
Harcourt drive 150 miles to buy them.
The Uzuakoli leprosy
hospital formerly depended entirely on overseas and
local charities. But six years ago, with the help
of a determined project manager and equipment
bought from J.P.M. Parry and Associates of Cradley
Heath, West Midlands, the lepers started making
bricks and roof tiles – at first to repair the
war-damaged hospital and later for sale. They
overcame desperate physical handicaps and regained
self-respect.
In the growing cities of
the developing world, the thatched roof is on the
way out because of fire risk and the short life and
depleted sources of thatch. Clay tiles require
clay, not found everywhere, and scarce firewood for
manufacture. Being heavy, they require stout roof
timbers and cannot profitably be carried far.
Corrugated iron requires only light timber but
usually has to be imported, is noisy in the rain,
gives no protection from heat or cold and has a
life of at most ten years through rusting. Yet an
efficient roof is essential if a house is to stand
the weather.
Parrys, set up by John
Parry, first designed a system for small-scale
brickmaking. Then they set out in 1977 to develop
one for roofs. The equipment needed to be robust,
easy to use and maintain, and affordable by small
entrepreneurs. The result, after six years of
experiment, was the Parry fibre-concrete roof tile,
only a third the weight of clay for a similar area.
A fibreless formula has also been
developed.
The tiles are
long-lasting, though easier to break than clay
tiles; but they can easily be replaced. They can
form a roof on crude poles, without sawn
timber.
Parrys sell a small
vibrating table (powered by a car battery or by
hand) from which a cement screed is drawn over a
mould to give it a profile. The Parry process
enables unskilled workers to make a sound roofing
tile of even thickness. The vibration allows both a
lean mix and a thin tile, so saving both cement and
supporting timber.
Equipment can be bought
for £1,000 but the most popular package, which
enables two workers to produce about 80 square
metres of roof a week, costs about £3,000. The
tilemaking equipment offers a roof up to 50 per
cent cheaper than corrugated iron (the percentage
varying from place to place). Launched in 1984,
Parry tiles are now being made in about 50
countries, and Parrys have followed up with
equipment to make other building
materials.
Tilemakers can be trained
within a day. Technical training for running a
tilemaking business, from materials selection to
roof-laying, needs a course of about a week with a
Parry agent.
Agents have to be
carefully selected and trained. A network of agents
is being built up but interest in the tilemaking
has tended to run ahead of organised marketing.
Tilemakers in new countries send trainees to
regional centres or even to Cradley Heath,
sometimes with help from aid donors.
Successful new technology
gets copied. The chief danger, according to Parrys,
is that local imitations wilI produce second-rate
tiles and thus damage public confidence. Parrys
seek to guard against this by building up technical
support in each country and by developing and
refining the equipment.
The largest single
tilemaking operation so far is run by a women’s
co-operative in Mathare Valley, a shanty settlement
outside Nairobi. When fibre-concrete roofing was
specified for 1,700 middle-income homes at nearby
Koma Rock, the recently formed Humama (Band of
Mothers) Co-operative set up in business to make
the tiles. With a loan from the African Housing
Fund, they bought nine machines and, working double
shifts, produced up to 4,200 tiles (323 square
metres of roof) a day.
Parrys’ Kenya associates
provided training, procurement, technical
supervision and quality control. Humama made a
surplus, after loan payments, of £25,000 in
the first year which is being spent on welfare
projects in Mathare. Humama shows how, with the
right equipment and a little help, the gulf between
modern and traditional economies can be
bridged.
Robin Spence of Cambridge
University has raised the question whether
developing countries should depend on British
equipment for their fibre-concrete roofing. Parrys
reply that, while local manufacture of equipment
will come and some components are already made
locally, they would not recommend it before the
tiles are really well established in the local
market.
A referee writes that the
building industry world-wide puts little into
research and development, partly because
innovations are easy to copy and partly because the
many small companies cannot afford it. “John Parry
is a refreshing and unique exception to this
rule.”
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