Brickmaking co-operatives

Brickmaking is an important craft in many rural and peri-urban areas, but the income it provides can be a very marginal one. Practical Action helps brickmakers to form co-operatives which can provide employment for men and women, as well as supplying locally produced bricks for use in local building projects.

Practical Action can provide technical advice, helping the brickmakers to experiment with, for example, new types of kiln, alternative fuels for the kilns, and different ways of using the kiln to get the most efficient and productive process.

It can also advise and train co-operative members on how to organise their enterprise, get legally registered, get access to credit, and improve brick quality to improve their access to markets.

For instance, in Sudan, Practical Action together with the brickmakers of the Shambob Co-operative researched new techniques which raised both the quality and the quantity of their brick production, doubling their incomes in two years.

Read the story of the Shambob Co-operative

These techniques included fuelling their kilns with organic residues such as cow dung and bagasse (a waste product of the local sugar industry) instead of wood; improving clay preparation and moulding and replacing traditional clamps with a permanent, more efficient Scotch Kiln.

In Zimbabwe more than 60 brick production sites have spontaneously taken up a more fuel-efficient technology adapted by Practical Action following a number of demonstration projects.

The technology uses coal instead of wood to fire traditional clamps, and considerably lowers the cost of production by reducing an average fuel consumption of one tonne of wood per 1000 bricks to just 150kg of coal.

Work in Zimbabwe has also explored the use of boiler waste from inefficient coal-fired boilers to further reduce fuel costs.