Challenges of Building Construction in Mekelle city, Ethiopia: from Contractors’ perspective

Building Construction in Mekelle city, Ethiopia is in a very fast growing in recent years than ever due to fast increasement of population and the desire of better living standards. Even though it shows fast growth is faced by different challenges that retards from complete on time and on budget and quality. The objective of this study is to identify the challenges that impact building construction and giving recommendation to the most critical challenges. A structured questionnaire has been distributed to 50 engineers in the profession from contractor side. Among the 50 respondents data has been collected from 34 (68%) respondents. The responses was analysed by relative importance index method (RII). The result shows that out of 25 factors the top five most are Delay in land acquisition, Lack of cost planning, Shifting of existing utilities, slow decision-making by owners, and Payment delays by owner. Hopefully, findings of this study will help contractors, clients, consultants and designers to avoid the challenges in their future works.