Project Overview

The Government of Rwanda is committed to reducing the environmental impacts of new buildings and has initiated efforts to achieve this by developing the Green Building Minimum Compliance System (GBMCS) which was approved by the Rwanda cabinet in April 2019 and is officially part of the Rwanda Building Code 2019. GGGI supported partner RHA in developing and raising awareness/capacity building on the GBMCS.

However, with regards to existing buildings, there are no data or any baselines available on the energy use, water use, and waste management practices adopted in Rwanda’s existing public building stock. Close to 74 large-scale existing public buildings are operating in Kigali and six secondary cities of Rwanda. RHA through the division in charge of public building construction and maintenance has a mandate to maintain existing public building assets in Rwanda. The division is also in charge of supervising renovations of existing public buildings.

Further, the database maintained by RHA in relation to existing public building assets and has not been updated since 2013 and is rudimentary in nature and does not capture the key/basic elements (both qualitative and quantitative parameters) that are required to effectively manage these assets. RHA is the process of getting a proposal approved to develop a new database of public buildings in the country which they aim to put it on a software platform (the current database in on excel spreadsheet).

The first component of the project aims at providing guidance to RHA to develop a decent database that captures the basic elements related to managing existing public buildings such as year of construction, area of the building, no. of floors, building typology, no. of building occupants, the current condition of the building, etc. to name a few. The component will further focus on conducting a baseline survey of all large-scale buildings using the data that is available. At a minimum, the baseline survey would assess 74 large-scale buildings in Kigali and secondary cities.

The second component will focus on preliminary/walk-through audits for select public buildings (up to 5 buildings) and propose recommendations to improve the performance of the buildings. The audits will also provide guidance on retrofitting interventions and high-level cost-benefit analysis. This information will be helpful the compute the green investment potential for greening all large-scale public buildings in Rwanda.

The third component of the project aims at developing an investment proposal (of at least $10M) to green the existing public buildings, the associated financial cost-benefit analysis, and the climate mitigation and adaptation potential. The investment proposal will also seek to enhance the financing mechanism by stimulating private sector involvement and integrating existing policy instruments to enhance the long-term sustainability of the implementation of resource efficiency measures.

The fourth component of the project proposes to develop easy to use guidelines to green existing public buildings. The guidelines will be an extension of the Green Building Minimum Compliance System (already approved and applicable to new buildings only), but with a lot of emphasis on greening the operational aspects of existing public buildings and will be voluntary in nature in terms of their applicability.

Project Objectives

The overall objective of the project is to bring in a transformational, scalable and replicable change in the way existing public buildings are operated in Rwanda by encouraging green and resource-efficient operational practices to reduce energy & water consumption and better waste management, promote net-zero energy initiatives (where feasible) by conducting a baseline survey of all large-scale public buildings in Rwanda, preliminary/walkthrough audits of at least 5 large-scale public buildings including cost-benefit analysis of recommendations, and develop a green investment proposal (worth at least $10M) to green 74 large-scale buildings that are operating in Kigali and six secondary cities. The conservative estimate of annual CO2 mitigation potential by ‘greening’ 74 large-scale public buildings operating in Kigali and 6 Secondary cities would be 6364 tonneCO2e/annum. This directly contributes towards the implementation of updated Rwanda NDC.

Further, based on the findings from the baseline survey, and audits the project aims to develop technical guidelines to green existing public buildings in Rwanda. The guidelines will help the facility managers to undertake green retrofitting initiatives.

Project Impact

GGGI role is to facilitate the transformation of existing public building stock into green buildings through a baseline survey, walkthrough audits, green investment proposal and technical guidelines. By transforming Rwanda’s existing public building stock into green buildings to reduce GHG emissions and thereby contribute towards Rwanda’s updated NDC implementation. The expected results woud be :

1. Develop a baseline survey of all large-scale public buildings in Rwanda conducted. The baseline survey would at the minimum include 74 buildings in Kigali and secondary cities. Recommendations provided to RHA to develop a database of existing public buildings ;
2. Conduct five walk-through audits and develop audit reports ;
3. At least $10M worth investment proposal developed to ‘green’ 74 existing large-scale public buildings ;
4. Guidelines to be developed to green existing public buildings