The Arthur Waser Foundation, based in Lucerne Switzerland recently agreed to sponsor a continuous research project called SRDU (Sustainable Rural Dwelling Unit) in Ethiopia to the tune of 460,000 Swiss Francs over the next three years. The project builds on academic research cooperation between the Housing Chair of the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction and City Development (EiABC) in Ethiopia and the Professorship of Dirk E. Hebel of Architecture and Construction at the Singapore - ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability and the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) in Singapore.

Dr. Elias Yitbarek initiated the project 2010 as part of his work at the Chair of Housing at the EiABC and has secured funding from the Arthur Waser Foundation for a pilot project in 2011, with support of the North-South Centre of ETH Zurich, Barbara Becker and the ETH Foundation, Nathalie Fontana. The pilot project was registerd as a great success.It involved building two housing units located approximately 175km south of the capital Addis Ababa and experimentaion with local building materials combined with new building techniques and autonomous operating energy supply units. This succes convinced the Arthur Waser Foundation to continue the engagement with the two universities and enlarge the scope of the work to included questions of capacity building, academic exchange with local schools and industry and the transfer of knowledge to a wide academic and non-academic audience in Africa.

Lara Davis, PhD researcher working under the supervision of Dirk E. Hebel at the ETH in Zurich, will fully concentrate her work towards the development of technical solutions in earthen masonry systems, which address challenges posed by environment conditions, as well as constraints in available building materials and skilled labour. She will also look into robustly co-designed training methodologies, which target maximum cultural relevance, mechanisms for knowledge exchange, and methods for sustainable technology transfer with long-term viability. Next to the strong focus towards on applied research, where full scale housing units will be builtd, two PhD students at the EiABC under the guidance of Dr. Elias Yitbarek will work on soft impact factors such as, socio-cultural frameworks, scaling-up and scaling-out strategies and participation models in order to guarantee a long lasting anchoring of the project in rural regions of Ethiopia as well as building up curricula for the academic impact in schools and universities.