Building Eco-Friendly Classrooms in Darfur
By Neal Deles and Debbie DeVoeThis year in Darfur, Sudan, against great odds, more than 200,000 6-year-olds will begin their education.
Students whose classes had been held outside look forward to using new classrooms, built in less than seven weeks with cured-soil bricks. Photo by Neal Deles/CRS
But many of these children will end up studying under the shade of a tree because there are too few classrooms. As the Darfur conflict moves into its seventh year, displaced people continue to pour into the region's few cities seeking safety. Schools are stretched to their limit, and demand keeps rising.
Catholic Relief Services believes every child has the right to an education. Since early 2005, we have built more than 80 permanent, 25 semipermanent and 280 temporary classrooms across West Darfur to help communities provide schooling for their children.
Promoting Education and Environmental Protection
"The displacement of people to larger towns is seriously impacting Darfur's fragile semiarid ecosystem," says Precious Sancho, CRS' shelter program manager in West Darfur. "As urban populations grow, the landscape is losing its scant vegetation to families desperate for wood to build temporary shelters, cook meals and create charcoal to sell. Communities also need wood to bake mud bricks in kilns for other construction needs."
Repairing temporary classrooms made out of poles and thatched grass is unwieldy and inefficient. They deteriorate in a year or two. CRS staff also worried about damage done to the environment when building permanent classrooms with baked bricks: each classroom requires about 23 trees to bake the 23,000 needed bricks.
Staff then learned of a simple block-pressing machine that creates bricks out of soil that then harden through curing. Funding from the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance enabled CRS' shelter program to test the technology by building 10 permanent classrooms. The pilot program allowed us to construct two buildings at each of five schools in El Geneina and in rural communities north of the state capital. The project also trained local masons in CRS' alternative building technology.
"We decided to call this new method CANB-TECH because it provides a 'canb'—Arabic for 'seat'—where people can sit and study," says Ismail Shadeen, CRS' senior project officer for the shelter program in West Darfur. "By training masons to construct the classrooms, CRS is also helping them create new sources of income."
"We are so excited to have these new classrooms in our beloved school," says Salma Hussein, a sixth-grade student at Shahid Abubaker Basic School in El Geneina. "The problem is that every grade is now thinking they'll get this classroom. I don't know what the principal will do. Thank you CRS!"
Easy Construction With Rock-Hard Bricks
Constructing bricks using the block press is easy and requires few materials. Teachers and parents can help sift soil and then mix it with some water and a small amount of cement. After someone fills the press with this mixture, a strong pull on the machine's lever compresses the soil into a solid block that is left to cure for 21 days.
CRS is training local masons in an alternative building technology that uses blocks of soil to construct new classrooms in Darfur in an eco-friendly manner. Photo by Neal Deles/CRS
"I am astonished. In no time I saw two classrooms standing ready for my poor students who have been sitting under the trees for a long time," shares El Amin Mohammed, principal of Shahid Abubaker Basic School. "It's hard to imagine that you can use soil to construct such solid blocks and produce such a nice building."
When selecting the pilot projects, CRS sought schools with strong parent-teacher associations to foster project support. At all of the schools, members of the PTA included masons and laborers who built the classrooms at no charge. In exchange, CRS provided free training on the CANB-TECH method. Once pilot classrooms were finished, CRS also gave the block-pressing machines to the masons to let them make and sell more blocks, both to earn extra income and to promote use of the alternative construction method in Darfur communities.
"This technology is environment-friendly, simple, and can be easily adopted by local masons and laborers. And the classrooms will last for a long time," explains Mohammed Hamdan, a mason now trained in block press technology and a member of the PTA for Shahid Abubaker Basic School. "I am so pleased with this project, for history will record that it's me who helped make it."
Many people—including government officials—have visited the schools to see the new classrooms. CRS is now seeking additional funding to build more CANB-TECH classrooms, particularly at schools serving displaced children. CRS is also training additional masons.
"All school members are motivated by this accomplishment," Principal Mohammed adds. "We feel like we threw the first stone in the river that will create a lot of ripples in other communities."
Neal Deles serves as CRS Sudan's northern area coordinator, working out of our El Geneina field office in West Darfur. Debbie DeVoe is CRS' regional information officer based in Nairobi, Kenya.
