A Matter of sustainable housing
A deep dive with research and business design expert Elyas Munye into the diverse topic of affordable housing, it’s environmental, economic and societal challenges and how we might solve them.
Question: Hi Elyas. We’re glad to have you as an interviewee for our second “A matter off…” series. How about a quick introduction and what you are doing?
Elyas: I'm back in school studying real estate development. After almost 10 years in digital product strategy, user research, and business design, I wanted to shift my focus to affordable and sustainable housing. My interest in housing was piqued when I was doing fieldwork in Tanzania and Kenya for a Berlin-based solar energy start-up that was offering solar energy to families that have no access to electricity. There I learned that a lot of families took the step to invest in a relatively expensive solar system for electricity when they were building a house for their families. When I looked into how our customers went about it I realized there are all kinds of problems they face including lack of access to financing and poor quality of materials and methods of building. I thought there must be a better way to work with local architects and international experts to build in a way that is affordable and sustainable.
Question: What led you there , what kept you from there?
Elyas: What led me there is that I just saw a really big opportunity to achieve impact. The interesting thing about housing is that it's not just a building, housing is a composite product, so through housing you have access to basic things like energy and water, but also social services like neighborhood schools, community and health services. Housing is also a home, it's where families live, kids grow, and memories are formed. The more I thought about what it would mean to find a solution for Tanzanian and Kenyan families, the more I could see the immense impact that could be realized.
What prevented me from there is really time and money. Unfortunately developing a house is not the same as developing a digital product. You can't just build a MVP and put it out there. There are all kinds of experts that need to be involved and so many stakeholders, especially in a place like Tanzania and Kenya where basic infrastructure is not always a given. So it needs time, dedicated people. But I do belive that once a first viable home is built and I can go form 0 to 1, then the ball will start rolling.
“… developing a house is not the same as developing a digital product. You can't just build a MVP and put it out there.”
– Elyas Munye
Question: What matters to you? What drives you?
Elyas: What drives me is curiosity and learning . But for me that does not mean sitting in the library all day reading, thinking and chit chatting. Yes that too, but curiosity and learning means working on challenges that matter and learning through that. For me that means finding an affordable and sustainable housing solution for Tanzania and Kenyan households that will give families access to renewable energy and clean water among other things. And with housing it does not make sense to think of just one house, but there has to be scale so we need to think about building communities with 10s or 100s of homes over time. And that leads to the need to have schools and access to healthcare and so on. That's the beauty of housing, it really ties all the basic individual and social needs into it. So that's what drives my curiosity right now.
Question: What is the biggest problem when it comes to fulfilling your matter or reaching the desired outcome?
Elyas: Well it's easy to say money, but I won't blame it on that. It's really difficult to go from 0 to 1. Also as I mentioned before my matter is housing in Kenya and Tanzania. A solution first needs to be designed. And for that to happen a lot of collaboration between local and international experts need to happen. There are already very good examples of solutions out there, but still some work needs to be done to find an adaptable and affordable solution. The other thing is that there are all type of moving parts when building a house, so it's risky to just jump into it without experience. That's why I decided to complete a masters in real estate development, get a bit of experience and find experts that I can work with.
Question: How do u bring matter into your work and work-life?
Elyas: For me it's really about curiosity and having a good environment of people to work with. I'm not really driven by grand visions of transforming the world into my image of what a good world should look like. I'm just interested in housing, I know that a lot to people don't have access to an affordable home. And I would just like to solve a difficult problem that people need, and in that process I hope to deliver a product that is also very sustainable, beautiful and become the basis for uplifting communities. But my matter is first to let curiosity and collaboration with people guide to that.
Question: As a take-away for our readers: What tip would you give people, who want to work on stuff that matters?
Elyas: Find something that makes you curious. For something to matter, you'd have to be excited to think about it, talk about it, and work on it a lot. That's the main thing I would say.
Elyas’ Matters: #sustainablehousing #collaboration #affordablehousing #community #learning