UN-Habitat has partnered with an East African organisation to promote academic capacity building and knowledge transfer for energy access, efficiency and low-carbon technologies in the field of sustainable housing. The partnership to be executed through the Promoting Energy Efficiency in Buildings in East Africa (EEBEA) project will see UN-Habitat working with the Joint development of courses for Energy efficient and sustainable housing in Africa (JENGA). The three year project will commence in 2013 and close in 2016, funded by the European Union and implemented by the Secretariat of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States is set to introduce a design-build teaching method, which is a practical approach based on learning by experience, into the existing curricula of the three participating schools of architecture. The core of the programme will be parallel design and construction studio courses, which will culminate in the realisation of three full-scale prototype buildings. These buildings will be JENGA-flood for storm and high water flooded areas near Lake Victoria in Kampala, JENGA-stack as an example of affordable two- or three-storey buildings for densely populated areas in Nairobi and JENGA-slope for the development of building types for sloping sites in Kigali. The JENGA project is an initiative by University of Applied Sciences Augsburg, Germany (UASA) and will be implemented in partnership with universities from Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and South Africa alongside associated experts from Egypt. The prototype buildings will be promoted and showcased as part of the pilot projects within the EEBEA project as best practices for energy-efficiency and appropriate local building technologies. Through consultation and joint activities, these two projects will ensure that the issue of energy efficiency in buildings can be addressed at policy maker level and at higher level institutions, granting a constant interaction between a growing academic knowledge base and implementation level. Present at the kick off meeting held at the University of Applied Sciences Augsburg (UASA), Augsburg, Germany last month were representatives of UASA partner institutions UN Habitat , Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture & Technology (Kenya), Uganda Martyrs University (Uganda), Stellenbosch University (South Africa), The University of Rwanda – College of Science and Technology, Rwanda (formerly Kigali Institute of Science and Technology) and The American University in Cairo (Egypt).