A commitment to enhancing engineering capabilities by incorporating safety and technology into the development agenda of Kenya’s built environment industry is a key priority for Nairobi-based State-owned engineering consultancy Engineers Board of Kenya (EBK).

The organisation aims to attract and retain globally competitive engineers who can deliver quality engineering services, and it does this through carefully overseeing the registration credentials of Kenyan engineers and consulting engineering firms.

“We are a State corporation, which means we have an Act of Parliament that backs the activities that we do, and we, therefore, represent public interests, not just the engineers as such, but the whole value chain of engineering . . . from basic education to women’s university programmes,” notes EBK CEO Margaret Ogai.

She highlights that the broad bottom-up economic transformation agenda of the company is based on delivering sufficient engineering solutions to address socioeconomic issues in Kenya, including housing deficits and collapsed buildings.

The consultancy is operating an affordable housing programme which facilitates the delivery of 200 000 housing units every year. Additionally, EBK is undertaking work on constructing a ‘digital superhighway’ in Nairobi, with 100 000 km of cables to be laid.

Regarding transportation, Ogai says Kenya remains a key transportation hub in East Africa and that increased efforts are under way to connect with neighbouring countries. There is a substantial World Bank-funded programme between Kenya and Somalia, called the Horn of Africa Gateway project, whereby 700 km of road will be developed to improve the movement of people and goods, ultimately aimed at enhancing trade and providing better access for social services in this region, she adds.

Safety Imperative

Elaborating on the need to advance safety skills in Kenya’s construction sector, EBK has partnered with global safety charity Lloyd’s Register Founda-tion, which has invested nearly £300 000 in a programme that aims to transform safety culture throughout the Kenyan construction industry.

The project, titled ‘Programme for Enhancement of Safety Skills for Engineers and Practitioners in the Construction Industry in Kenya’, will support the development of curricula, courses and monitoring tools, so that practitioners and workers have the capacity, capability and understanding to identify and address risks to safety on construction sites countrywide.

“We want to look at university students, particularly those who are being trained to be engineers, and we want to include safety-related aspects in their curriculum. As an organisation with experienced engineering professionals, we have a duty to orient aspirant engineers towards a new safety dispensation and develop new standards that can effectively mitigate some of the accidents occurring in this sector,” Ogai explains.

A key consideration in addressing sectoral challenges is to assess the use and value of monitoring and evaluation processes: “I think we are not very good at collecting data, even to inform future policy and advocacy frameworks, so we want to come up with an effective monitoring and evaluation framework, which will accurately monitor progress and help us to identify [any] gaps.”

Within the global nongovernmental organisation Federation of African Engineers Organisation (FAOE) rests a committee of registrants from some East African countries that assess how engineering practitioners ought to standardise practices within the construction sector.

Kenya is also bidding to join the International Engineering Alliance as a way of furthering the global recognition of its engineering practices, with increasing efforts to ensure engineering technologists and technicians receive equal recognition.

Ogai says the engineering sector will play a pivotal role in achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as engineers can help to identify opportunities, monitor progress and develop innovations that help to build resilient infrastructure.

“If we look at the SDGs, 80% of them are squarely going to be delivered by competent, professional and ethical engineering practitioners. From a global perspective, we really need to use engineering to serve humanity. “[T]herefore, we need to improve capacities and capabilities of engineers, as well as enhance their skills sets based on ever-evolving safety and technology improvements,” she concludes.