Meet the Team Behind Kumasi’s Award-Winning Community Housing Project
When the Aboabo Community Land Trust broke ground two years ago on a 120-unit affordable housing development in Kumasi, few expected the project to become a model studied by urban planners across Africa.
The project — built almost entirely by local tradespeople from within the community — has won the 2026 African Housing Excellence Award and is now being referenced in policy discussions from Lagos to Nairobi.
At its heart is a simple idea: hire locally, train on the job, and reinvest profits back into the community. Seventy-eight per cent of the construction workforce were Kumasi residents with no prior formal trade certification when they started.
The People Behind It
Project lead Akosua Mensah, a civil engineer who left a London firm to return home, says the secret was patience. We took six extra months to train people properly before we laid a single foundation block, she told Drovus World. The result is a building that will outlast all of us.
