Pre-school and teacher accommodation

Background

Aframano has a junior school with four or five classrooms, for children aged 5 to 12. This accommodates children of junior school age.

The villagers wanted to establish a pre-school for children too young to go to the junior school. This will benefit the children by preparing them for school education, but importantly it will also benefit parents, by freeing them of childcare during part of the day and enabling them to work. Turbo Ghana planned to build the school and then hand it over to the local education authority, who will staff it and run it as a school.

The villagers also wanted to have teacher accommodation, because the village is very remote and teachers resist being posted there. Teachers would have to commute several hours each day, or sleep locally - they sometimes slept in the junior school class room. To make the village more attractive to teachers and hence to attract higher quality teachers, Turbo Ghana planned to build some basic accommodation, and hand it over to the village Unit Committee.

The new school building and the rebuilt teacher accommodation buildings

We undertook the building work between January and May 2022. The school opened for lessons on 1 August 2022.

The school

The school has two large class rooms, each 7m x 6.6m; and two smaller rooms of 4.2m x 3.2m (one an office, one a store room). There is also a verandah of 1.8m x 14m. In total, the space is about 150 sq m.

Click on any photo to get a big version.

The teachers’ accommodation

Instead of building new buildings, we rebuilt two derelict buildings. Here, they are shown after the rebuild. The left one has 4 rooms, each of which can accommodate 2 teachers. The right one has 2 rooms, each of which can accommodate 3 teachers. Thus, at maximum occupancy there could be 14 teachers in residence.

The school at various stages of development

Here you can see some photos that were taken during the construction.

Progress (February 2022)

We have begun building the pre-school near the existing school building. It has two classrooms and two other rooms (suitable as offices or store rooms).

The building blocks are hand-made on-site.

The school will comprise two large rooms, each 7m x 6.6m; and two smaller rooms of 4.2m x 3.2m. There is also a verandah of 1.8m x 14m. In total, the space is about 150 sq m. Here, you see the foundations and a few centimeters of wall, which was the stage when I visited in February.

Progress (March 2022)

Building work continues apace! Assemblyman Kwasi Alare sends me photos of the building work by WhatsApp. They will start the roofing soon.

Progress (April 2022)

Progress (May 2022)

The teachers’ accommodation at various stages of development

February 2022

We are refurbishing these two buildings.

The bigger block will provide 4 small rooms (2 teachers) and 2 larger rooms (3 teachers) – total up to 14 teachers.