By Fiona Beckerlegge | Executive Director
After making a great start to the Centre of Excellence building project in the last half of 2022, progress has faltered due to a delay in funding, meaning that we cannot finish the first 2 units and move the therapy and rehabilitation team into the new premises as planned.
It all started when Kyaninga Child Development Centres Founding Director, Steve Williams, met Markus Dobmeier, a tutor at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich (HM) and one of the Founding Directors of the German-based NGO “Bauen für Orangefarm” (BfO) in 2019, and shared his ideas for a Centre of Excellence for the treatment and education of children with disabilities in western Uganda. After this first meeting, the idea emerged to integrate the project into the German University’s curriculum as a so-called “Design-Build” Project, where students research, design, and work on the construction of projects. The design phase started with a site survey conducted in 2020 by a BfO Team.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the start of the construction was unfortunately delayed by nearly two years. At the end of 2021, we began by levelling the land to reduce the slope and make it more accessible and removing the vegetation layer to access good soil, which we are using to produce the blocks for our walls. Through a donation from Kyaninga Forest Foundation, we planted 280 indigenous trees, creating a natural and soft boundary around the site.
After a further Covid-19 delay, work started in earnest in early July 2022 with the construction of a sanitary unit, storage, guardhouse and a covered shed to cure our blocks. In the following weeks, the foundations and bricks were prepared just to be ready for the student’s arrival in the last week of August. To be environmentally friendly, we produce rammed-earth bricks using the earth excavated for the foundations. The physical effort to create these bricks was evidenced when some of our team members visited the site and took 5 people to make just one!!!!
In August 2022, 11 students from Ugandan Martyrs University and 11 students from various universities in Germany worked with local artisans on the project. During this period, the students engaged in multiple aspects of actual construction, such as addressing and solving design or detailing questions, casting concrete, block laying, producing roof trusses etc. We got fantastic overall feedback from the students, and we look forward to having another group here soon, hopefully in July 2023.
After the students left, the work continued with local artisans and is still ongoing.
So far, we have finished the core build, foundations, walls, columns, and ring beam, as well as the roof trusses and roofing sheets of units 1 and 2, which will be home to the admin team and 5 therapy treatment rooms.
We are now looking for additional funding partners to help complete these first 2 units, which will allow the team to move from the outgrown rented property we are currently in. The larger project plans to build an inclusive model school and a professional development centre on the same site so that we will truly become a centre of excellence for disability and inclusion within Uganda.
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