Roofing in Burkina Faso

Burkina Faso, a landlocked country in the Sudano-Sahelian belt, has a strong tradition of earth building and has become an international reference for low-cost, climate-responsive roofs. Its villages still include earth-walled compounds with flat or thatched roofs, while most households now live under what national surveys classify as "permanent" roofing, chiefly metal sheet.

Climate and hazards

The north is Sahelian and dry; the south-west is wetter savanna. A single rainy season brings intense storms that erode earth roofs, followed by a long, hot dry season with harmattan dust. Metal-sheet roofs, now the norm, make interiors very hot, which has driven architectural experiments with double and ventilated roofs.

Roofing history

Earth construction in the region is ancient and continuous. The Royal Court of Tiébélé, seat of the Kassena king (Pè) in the south of the country, was founded in the 16th century; its adobe buildings, painted exclusively by women, were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2024.

Traditional and vernacular roofs

• Flat earth roofs: timber joists covered with sticks or mats and compacted earth, as across the Sahel (see Sahelian earthen roofs).
• Kassena houses (Tiébélé, Nahouri Province): adobe buildings whose painted decoration is the work of women.

Roofing today

Burkina Faso's Harmonised Survey on Household Living Conditions (EHCVM) for 2021-2022, run by the national statistics institute INSD, records whether a household's roof is made of "permanent materials" (matériaux définitifs). In the cross-section survey sample, 91.5% of about 7,200 households answered yes (unweighted counts).

The Afrobarometer surveys, which interview about 1,200 adults, give more detail (unweighted sample counts):

Roof of respondent's home	2015	2017
Metal, aluminium, tin or zinc	66.8%	68.0%
Thatch or grass	24.7%	15.3%
Tiles	0.5%	7.9%
Multiple materials	5.4%	3.3%
Plastic sheets	0.0%	2.6%
Concrete	1.3%	0.7%

The Afrobarometer questionnaire has no separate category for earth roofs, so flat earth roofs are not identified in these figures.

Burkina Faso is also the home of two widely studied responses to the heat and cost of metal roofs:

• The Gando primary school (2001), by Diébédo Francis Kéré: a corrugated metal roof raised on light steel trusses above a ceiling of compressed earth blocks, so that air flows through the gap and the earth mass moderates indoor temperature. It received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004 (see Gando Primary School).
• Nubian vaults: since 2000 the association La Voûte Nubienne, whose early work concentrated on Burkina Faso, Mali and Senegal, has trained masons to build timber-free earth-brick vaults.

Industry

The Gando school was built with compressed earth blocks made by villagers trained by LOCOMAT, a government agency promoting local building materials.

Notable roofs

• Gando primary school (2000-2001): raised, ventilated metal roof over an earth-block ceiling.
• Royal Court of Tiébélé: painted Kassena adobe architecture, World Heritage site since 2024.

Local roofing terms

• banco: wet earth used for bricks and plaster.
• matériaux définitifs (French, survey usage): "permanent materials", the survey category for durable roof materials.

Sources and gaps

No national roofing-specific code was identified in published sources. No information on domestic roofing-sheet manufacturers was found in published sources.

Survey figures are unweighted sample counts, and the Afrobarometer categories do not separate earth roofs.