Humanihut Field Infrastructure System

Many of the 63 million worldwide refugees are housed in canvas tents. The risk of contracting disease is significant. Winters and Summers are harsh and security is non-existant. The Humanihut design addresses this situation through the delivery of an entire temporary infrastructure system including accommodation, clean drinking water, sewerage management and power generation. A Humanihut Village is a comfortable, settled, albeit temporary community, offering a dignified short term replacement for a home lost through disaster.

The concept of the Humanihut Shelter System was developed during a conversation by the Co-Founders in February 2013 to enhance temporary living conditions of Syrians fleeing civil war. We now have a scalable field infrastructure system that can provide accommodation, services and utilities and is so rapid in its deployability that a team of five, with a telehandler, can establish a village for 2,500 people in three days. Its design is so agile, it has been adapted to suit the humanitarian, civil defence, commercial and defence markets. A committment to high quality materials ensures its life will exceed 20 years.

Based on a camp of 50,000 people the Humanihut Shelter System will break even with the cost of a comparable tent camp in 3.5 years and save camp managers $40m each year in infrastructure spending thereafter. It is deployed onto a greenfield site with fully enclosed water and sewerage treatment systems. When no longer required it can be removed from site in the same time it took to deploy, leaving a limited footprint. The clean and secure environment of the Village, whilst not home, will ensure the community's period of displacement is comfortable, secure with a reduced risk of disease.

The 'system' of a fully serviced, rapidly deployable, rigid, secure accommodation facility has been protected by a pending patent. The hinge which allows floor, walls and roof to remain connected ensuring rapid establishment has been designed by the Humanihut Team and is also protected by a pending patent. These two design initiatives place the Humanihut Shelter System into its own category with known commercial alternatives but as yet no immediate commercial competitors. Fully deployed in purpose built shipping containers, which when deployed are reconfigured into bathrooms or community based themed recreation rooms, the Humanihut Shelter System is based on a 'Block' consisting of three containers and 32 Humanihuts capable of accommodating up to 256 people. By replicating the 'Block' the Village can be scaled to any size. Everything required to establish the camp, including the equipment to reconfigure the containers into bathrooms, is secured within the three containers. A highly logistically efficient solution.