Understanding the Collapse of Kampala City Buildings Kigozi Joseph, Uganda Mr. Kigozi Joseph is a Project Engineer Working with PROME Consultants Limited and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Makerere University with honours. He sits on the Uganda Association of Consulting Engineers, FIDIC Future Leaders committee and serves as a Capacity Development champion on this committee. Mr. Kigozi Joseph has made significant contributions on various infrastructure projects within Kampala City ranging from transportation, through to drainage and housing. Some of the most recent projects in which he has been involved include; The design of a pilot city bus service and public transport advisory services as well as the development of the non-motorized transport manual for Uganda. Mr. Kigozi Joseph has strived to share his technical knowledge and experience at various regional conferences, with the vision to improve the wider infrastructure sector through capacity building. Most recently he has been engaged in the FIDIC- GAMA Conference, held in Kampala and the 1st Smart transport infrastructure summit held in Dar-es Salaam. The explosive population growth in African cities is usually a primary reference point when discussing the problems and challenges that are facing Africa today. Like many other African cities, Kampala’s growth is exponential and outstripping supply and so the city is undergoing a remarkable urban transformation. As African cities also continue to grow economically, the city sky lines are being painted with magnificent buildings soring higher and higher owing to the technological advancement in building techniques and technologies. Unfortunately, however, such rapid growth has come at a cost and it is one the sector should not be proud of. The same buildings that are uplifting our economies are in many cases tragically taking lives people that are; constructing them, residing in them as well as doing business in them. Uganda unlike many counties in the western world is not prone to extreme natural disasters such as hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones and high magnitude earthquakes, yet even with the existing technical competence in structural engineering, building collapses are a common tragic occurrence. Indeed, the collapse of buildings is not a new phenomenon and such events have occurred since the prehistoric times, this however, does not mean we should not be striving for improvement and putting more effort into this under-researched issue. In order to save our cities from the life-threatening and economic situations of collapsing buildings, there is need for exhaustive analysis beyond the engineering defects and short falls of the situations that indeed lead to the occurrence of the defects within the early stages of projects that the ultimately result into catastrophic building failures even in the absence of extreme natural disasters.
Building Collapse History of Kampala The table below shows some of the recorded incidents of building collapses in Kampala since September 2004, the number of fatalities and the reported cause of collapse.
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