The Kenya Bureau of Standards has now brought bamboo used for construction under its watch to ensure it meets set standards.
The standardisation, according to Kebs will facilitate manufacturing and trade in quality products and ensure consumer safety.
Kebs managing director Bernard Njiraini said the bamboo industry is a new and exciting industry, with untapped investment potential enough to increase growth and employment in the country.
Data by the Kenya Forest Service showed the bamboo forest area stood at only 59,000 hectares in 2021 out of a total forest cover of 5.22 million hectares.
The adoption of bamboo as an alternative building material will ease pressure on wood and metal, whose prices have skyrocketed in recent months.
Some real estate developers and Kenyans seeking to put up houses have been been forced to shelve their plans following a jump in global steel prices.
Price hikes in the vital component in the construction industry was largely driven by rising demand on supply fears related to the Ukraine war.
The price of steel in the international market risen by about $135 (Sh15,255) a tonne are still moving up since the conflict started in the last week of February.
Bamboo is a largely an underutilised resource in Kenya and Africa as a whole with existing initiatives tending to occur in isolation.
Despite having 12 per cent of the world’s global bamboo resources according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN, Africa accounts for just one per cent of the estimated $60+ billion (Sh7.0 trillion) of world trade in bamboo.
Bamboo is a natural composite material with a high strength-to-weight ratio that can be useful for structures.
The new standard gives the specification which bamboo culm should meet to be considered as proper building material.
In also gives susceptible classes of bamboo culms when it comes to splitting and how to mitigate the same. It guides where the bamboo culms should be used to ensure durability of buildings.
The new guidelines are among 205 standard Kebs has introduced cutting across a myriad of sectors including Food and Agriculture, Textile, Cosmetics, ICT and service industry.
The food industry standard provides requirements of tea intended for further processing into tea extracts such as infusions.
The new standard ICT provides guidelines on the measurements of environmental noise, while also calling for standardisation of distance learning in Kenya.
Distance learning gained momentum in 2020 after the Covid-19 outbreak which disrupted classroom learning of over 14.3 million learners.
Njiraini said standardisation in this area is quite critical to ensure uniform quality of education.
Kenya Bureau of Standards has also approved the adoption of a standard on Greenhouse Gases.
