July 2013
The secondary school is a mixed boys and girls facility and the boys and girls come from miles around. Before exams the pressure is really on the students to do their best and the teachers often lay on after-school sessions for revision purposes.
Unfortunately, on the Equator it starts to get dark around 6.30pm all year round so any female student studying late at school can be vulnerable to attack. There is a lot of lawlessness in the area and security is very poor at night.
We did hear some dreadful stories that we will not go into here. Suffice is to say the Headmaster appealed for us to provide a dormitory for the girls allowing them to stay in school overnight.
Suzanne asked around on her return from Kenya and with a private donation of £10,000 and another of £3,000 from the ED Charitable Foundation, we had enough to provide at least one facility to house at least 20 girls. A further donation of over £10,000 by The Funding Network will allow us to finish the project.
Work started in the first quarter of 2013 and photos are online.
Project details
The project we built at Magunga Secondary School was 2 buildings 15m by 8m with 12 room for up to 50 girls, plus an ablution facility.
The construction was done with a technology which is new to the region. Soil cement blocks are a revolutionary new building material that has the advantage of the traditional building bricks in that they:
- Can be prepared locally on site using locally available unskilled labour
- Are prepared without being fired (unlike normal bricks) meaning that there is no requirement to cut down and burn trees
- Require no mortar to keep them together are they have an interlocking design
- Require no exterior plaster and no reinforcement columns as the blocks themselves are significantly stronger than the usual brick and mortar constructions we’ve been building until now.
All of these elements allowed us to deliver a building with a similar cost to what we would normally expect to pay and one that is much more environmentally friendly.
This technology was just brought to our attention in our last field visit to Kisumu in November 2012 and se we are rushing now to adapt the budget to this new technology.
(For more information on this block technology: www.hydraform.com.)
