Ethiopia built hundreds of thousands of affordable flats — but few were designed for the heat inside them. A study of 317 homes in Jimma asks what 'comfortable' really means here, and how residents cope.
Climate change is pushing indoor temperatures up, and the discomfort lands hardest in low-income housing. Since 2005, Ethiopia's Integrated Housing Development Program has delivered vast numbers of low-cost units at speed — but thermal comfort was rarely part of how they were designed or built.
Limited attention has been given to thermal comfort in the design and construction of those affordable housing units.
Asres et al., Energy & Buildings (2026)
Across the dry and wet seasons of 2023, the team monitored indoor environments with sensors and ran structured surveys in 317 IHDP houses in Jimma, drawn from a population of 1,520 households. They paired an adaptive comfort model with binary logistic regression to link how rooms feel to what residents actually do about it.
A local comfort temperature, and a behavior that switches on sharply once it's crossed.
Window opening doesn't ramp up gently with heat — it flips. Below the comfort temperature, residents mostly keep windows shut; above 30 °C, almost everyone opens them. Indoor and outdoor temperature are the strongest predictors of that choice, with the fitted model giving logit(Pw) = 0.448·Tin − 11.01 (n = 317, p < 0.001).
Opening windows is the front line, but it sits within a wider repertoire of low-tech adaptations — adjusting clothing, shifting activities, and using what few appliances are available. Where these options are blocked by building design or cost, occupants are left exposed, and that constraint is itself a design failure.
Comfort in these homes is built on behavior the design never planned for. Treating window operability, orientation, and ventilation as first-class concerns — not afterthoughts — would let Ethiopia's next wave of high-rise affordable housing keep residents comfortable instead of leaving them to improvise.
Integrate thermal comfort and window operability into the design of massive high-rise residential housing developments.
Authors: Belsti Asres, Jiayu Pan, Ronita Bardhan & Esayas Alemayehu
Dilla University · University of Cambridge · Jimma University. Published in Energy & Buildings 360 (2026) 117375.
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