Steel Shelter Solutions for Refugee Camps: Meeting UNHCR & Sphere Procurement Standards

By the end of 2025, an estimated 117.8 million people worldwide remained forcibly displaced due to conflict, persecution, and violence, including 41.6 million refugees and 68.7 million people displaced within their own countries. At the same time, UNHCR's available resources have not kept pace with need: funding covered only 37 percent of total requirements in 2025, down from 48 percent the previous year, forcing the agency to do more with significantly less. For shelter and settlement teams, this combination of rising caseloads and shrinking budgets makes procurement decisions more consequential than ever. A shelter solution that fails to meet technical standards, or that needs to be replaced within a single season, is not just a technical shortfall — it is a budget line that cannot be spent twice.

Traditional emergency options such as tents and lightweight prefabricated sheet housing remain essential for the first days of a crisis, but they were never designed to satisfy the structural durability, thermal performance, and multi-year service life that Sphere and UNHCR technical standards call for once a settlement moves beyond the acute emergency phase. This guide walks through what those standards actually require, and how prefabricated steel structural systems are increasingly being evaluated as a compliant, cost-effective option for procurement teams moving from emergency response toward durable settlement solutions.

Understanding the International Standards: What UNHCR and Sphere Require of Shelter

Any procurement specification for camp or settlement housing should be built backward from the technical standards that donors, coordination clusters, and UNHCR's own emergency guidance already require. Four requirements recur across the reference documents most commonly used by shelter procurement teams.

Living space and ceiling height. The Sphere Handbook (2018), the internationally recognized minimum standard for humanitarian shelter response, sets a minimum of 3.5 square meters of covered living space per person in warm climates, rising to 4.5–5.5 square meters per person in cold climates or where cooking and sanitation activities take place indoors. Internal floor-to-ceiling height should be at least 2 meters, and UNHCR's own emergency shelter guidance echoes this figure while noting that greater height is preferable wherever it can support better air circulation and ventilation.

Family shelter over communal accommodation. UNHCR's emergency shelter guidance is explicit that individual family shelter should be prioritized over communal accommodation wherever feasible, since private, individual units better support privacy, psychological comfort, and emotional safety for displaced households. This has direct implications for unit design: procurement specifications increasingly call for modular, family-sized units rather than large undivided halls.

Material lifespan and maintenance burden. UNHCR guidance repeatedly flags that shelter materials deteriorate over time, and that replacement, reinforcement, or maintenance should be anticipated from the outset rather than treated as an afterthought. Given that camps and settlements are, in UNHCR's own words, rarely occupied for only a short period and often persist for years or decades, the total cost of a shelter solution has to be evaluated across its full service life, not just its initial unit price.

Climate and contextual adaptation. Standards are explicit that shelter solutions should be adapted to the geographical context, climate, cultural practice, and local availability of construction skills and materials — there is no single specification that fits every operation. Structural stability requirements also increase in areas exposed to high wind, and UNHCR's own technical procurement documentation for tents specifies a minimum roof load capacity of 300 N/m² under ISO 8937 snow-load testing, along with seam-strength testing requirements under ISO 1421-1 for waterproofing performance.

Taken together, these standards point toward the same underlying requirements: structural safety under load, long-term durability with a manageable maintenance profile, climate-appropriate building envelopes, and the ability to deliver family-sized private units at scale rather than one-off builds.

Where Prefabricated Steel Structures Meet These Requirements

Prefabricated steel building systems are not a new invention for humanitarian settings, but the underlying engineering logic maps unusually well onto the four requirements above.

Structural load performance. Where Sphere and UNHCR technical documentation set explicit minimum roof-load and structural stability thresholds, engineered steel frame systems are designed with calculated load tolerances that can be verified against wind, snow, and seismic loading data for a given region — the same category of technical documentation that UNHCR's own laboratory validation process requires from tent and shelter suppliers before approval. Akoetech's S-CAS steel structure system is engineered around this principle, using a modular structural framework designed to be verified against site-specific load requirements rather than relying on a single fixed specification across all climates.

Building envelope and climate adaptation. Sphere's differentiated standards for warm and cold climates — and UNHCR's guidance on insulation, ventilation, and heating efficiency — call for an envelope system that can be adjusted by region rather than a one-size-fits-all wall and roof assembly. The S-CAS envelope system is built to be configured for insulation, moisture control, and ventilation performance according to the specific climate zone of a given settlement, which is the same context-adaptation principle that UNHCR guidance asks procurement teams to evaluate for any shelter solution.

Scale, standardization, and speed of delivery. UNHCR's settlement planning guidance emphasizes coordinated, standardized approaches across a Master Planning framework, particularly for settlements that may eventually house tens of thousands of people. Digital design tools such as BIM-based systems allow a single validated unit design to be replicated consistently across hundreds or thousands of family units, with design, structural calculation, and production data managed in one integrated workflow. Akoetech's S-CAS BIM system (SCBIM) is built around this logic — integrating structural design, envelope specification, and production planning so that a design validated once can be manufactured and assembled repeatedly to the same technical standard, which supports the kind of consistent quality control that large-scale settlement procurement requires.

Lifespan and reduced maintenance burden. Because UNHCR guidance frames shelter materials as assets that deteriorate and require reinforcement over time, the comparative service life of a shelter system is a legitimate procurement criterion, not just an upfront cost comparison. Steel structural systems generally offer a longer functional lifespan than canvas, tarpaulin, or light-gauge emergency sheeting, which can reduce the frequency of replacement cycles and associated logistics costs over a multi-year settlement lifecycle — directly addressing the "years or decades" timeline that UNHCR settlement guidance describes as typical.

How NGOs and UNHCR Evaluate and Procure Shelter Suppliers

Understanding the technical standards is only half of the procurement picture. Suppliers also need to understand the process through which UNHCR and partner NGOs actually source and validate shelter solutions.

The UN Global Marketplace (UNGM). UNHCR's Supply Management Service, based in Budapest, publishes procurement opportunities through UNGM, the shared UN system marketplace where suppliers register and bid on opportunities ranging from vehicle fleets to construction materials and shelter items. Registration on UNGM is typically the first practical step for any manufacturer seeking to be considered for UNHCR or partner-agency tenders.

Technical validation and laboratory testing. Before a shelter product is approved for large-scale procurement, UNHCR's technical documentation describes a validation process in which physical samples are sent to approved laboratories for material and performance testing — for example, tent products undergo both material testing and rain testing, with acceptance contingent on passing every criterion evaluated. This reflects the general principle procurement teams should expect: technical claims need to be demonstrated through third-party testing, not asserted in a product brochure.

Key evaluation criteria procurement teams commonly assess:

• Structural load and wind-resistance test reports, referenced against relevant ISO or equivalent standards
• Material certification for corrosion resistance, fire performance, and durability under the destination climate
• Transport and logistics efficiency — the weight and volume of packaged units relative to the number of people housed
• Manufacturing capacity and realistic delivery timelines against the scale of the operation
• Availability of on-site assembly training and technical support so that local teams or partner contractors can complete installation without extended dependence on the supplier

Where an integrated supplier model fits. Because these evaluation criteria span design, manufacturing, and on-site assembly, procurement teams increasingly favor suppliers who can be evaluated as a single accountable point of technical responsibility rather than assembling several disconnected vendors for design, fabrication, and installation. Akoetech operates as this kind of one-stop provider — combining BIM-based structural design, in-house steel structure and envelope manufacturing, and on-site assembly support within a single S-CAS-based workflow — which aligns with how procurement evaluations are typically structured around end-to-end technical accountability rather than component-by-component sourcing.

Conclusion: From Emergency Response to Durable Settlement

UNHCR's own guidance increasingly frames the goal of shelter assistance not as indefinite reliance on tents, but as a pathway toward more durable, dignified settlement solutions once the acute emergency phase has passed. Steel-based prefabricated shelter systems sit squarely within that transition: they are engineered to meet the load, durability, and climate-adaptation benchmarks that Sphere and UNHCR technical standards already specify, while offering the manufacturing scale and design standardization that large, multi-year settlements require.

For NGO and UNHCR procurement teams evaluating shelter suppliers, the most useful diligence question is not simply what a unit costs, but whether a supplier can demonstrate structural, material, and delivery performance against the standards its operation is already required to meet.