For over a decade, the Hilti Foundation investigates and promotes innovative bamboo construction technologies for affordable housing in Southeast Asia. Together with the BASE Bahay Foundation, located in Manila, and implementing partners, more than 1,500 houses have been built in the Philippines and Nepal.

Where would you sleep, live, and raise your kids without a safe place to call home? Adequate housing is recognized as a human right. Yet, in Nepal, nearly half of the population lives in substandard housing conditions, hindering their opportunities for social and economic advancement. Like many in her country, 29-year-old Pramila, a devoted mother of two, intimately understands the impact of this challenge.

With its research and testing center, the Bamboo Academy and its own construction projects in the Philippines, Nepal and other Asian countries, the BASE Bahay Foundation, founded by the Hilti Foundation in 2014, aims to make bamboo a standard building material of the future – dedicated to the needs in construction of low-income families.

The Affordable Housing & Technology focus area is about changing the way low-income families build and live. Here, our work is based on three initiatives: spreading bamboo construction, creating an inclusive housing industry, and building coalitions of impact.

The Hilti Foundation and Habitat for Humanity are working together to scale Cement Bamboo Frame Fechnology in Nepal and the Philippines. This innovative building method was developed by Base Bahay Foundation, an organization founded by the Hilti Foundation. The homes built using this technology are constructed with specially treated bamboo and cement plaster that makes them disaster-resilient and sustainable.

Habitat for Humanity, a longtime partner organization of the Hilti Foundation, has started to build safe and disaster-resilient homes in Nepal for families in need. Since its inception in 1997, bamboo has been the environmentally friendly and local building material of choice for Habitat Nepal. But the current project is the first in the country to use the Hilti Foundation’s innovative CBFT.

In January 2021, BASE inaugurated the BASE Innovation Center (BIC), a comprehensive research and testing facility for safe, affordable, green and sustainable housing technologies.