Sustainable Housing for Rural Communities in Mali

AVN’s Training Centre reinforced to deliver intensified training

At the start of this season, AVN has started the first collaborative workshops to develop training tools and materials as part of the reinforced training activities in place since 2016. This brought together the various actors involved in training, including over 60 actual and potential trainer masons*, 15 regional and 8 national AVN staff, and the international coordinators from the Training Centre.

Organised locally with 6 one-week sessions in 3 countries, these workshops aimed to:

• bring together the overall vision of all the actors involved;
• develop together the job description of trainer masons;
• identify and try to understand the needs and concerns of the trainer masons;
• complete and approve the methods proposed by the Training Centre;
• identify and co-develop the tools needed by the trainer masons and training coordinators (evaluation tools, pedagogical and methodological checklists);
• define the relationships between the different training actors, in particular between the trainer masons and the training coordinators.

A lot of time was spent on the devel opment of the Apprentice Record booklet, the main working tool of the trainer mason. To this end, the Training Centre tested an innovatory method which involved projecting (on a wall) in real time pictograms for each technical post, prepared on a graphics tablet. The objective was to help the illiterate trainer masons (more than half of them) to make entries in the booklet. Following on, the good-humoured participants took part in role-playing exercises based on these pictograms.

In a second phase - 6 weeks later - the international coordinators from the Trainng Centre met with the regional and national staff to confirm their respective roles and to develop together the monitoring tools and procedures for the 2017-2018 season’s training programme.

Further training sessions are planned at the start of 2018 for the trainer masons, and for the regional and partner teams (like those for the PISCCA project in Burkina Faso and the Fouta teams in Senegal) with the overall aim of intensifying training actions for all NV apprentices and masons.

* selected from the pool of artisan masons for their pedagogical skills and their personal career ambitions.

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A NV health centre for the Mopti region

The first community construction site of the 2017-18 season in Mali, initiated by the French Bilou-Toguna Association for the Malian NGO Delta-Survie of Mopti, was completed at the end of December.  This 37 m2 health centre was built in a few weeks by a young Malian artisan mason, Abdoulaye Fané, and his team. This is one of the few NV buildings in the Mopti region, after those completed near Badiangara.

The Mopti region is well known for its validation of earth architecture, so the development of an AVN programme here should be both relevant and welcome. Other building techniques using local raw materials have already been tested by NGO’s and local actors in the construction sector, but it would appear that the NV technique is the one most suited to local construction challenges, providing greater comfort at a lower cost, the creation of local jobs, respect of the environment, and adaptation to and attenuation of the effects of climate change.

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