Once upon a time a man had a dream.
A dream that began while helping in several humanitarian missions and was reinforced by the spirit and need of a small rural village in Ghana. Abamkwam: a place with as much potential as poverty, as much illness as willingness to improve.
The first step in the process of revitalizing the village was the fix of a broken water pump. A small act that rose health levels and promoted a better quality of life. But there was still work to do, so the former teacher came back to Portugal – with a bag full of experience and ambition, he spread the word among students and co-workers: it’s not easy to change the world, but the challenge (and the hope) is to believe that by improving one life, we are making a difference. His words were not in vain – a group of students from a local secondary school working on an academic project concerning solidarity and action offered themselves to be part of the idealism and try to make it come true. And so did a group of teachers, that opened their arms to the idea of creating a fund to pay the salaries of the ghanaian teachers working in Abamkwam until they reach the minimal standards to have financial support from the national government. That was the beginning of a movement that soon would be expanded to other supporters out of the school – a group shaped under the same sense of love and commitment that would have as their first mission to build a new school in the village. That is our assignment today – a simple act that will bring new opportunities for an amazing community.
Once upon a time a man had a dream. Now, we believe in it.

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How to organize the program in the field?

Understanding the importance of a new school for the community of Abamkwan and the economical and social impact the same would have was the first step of our creative process, in order to establish priorities and goals for the project. Always in cooperation with portuguese students, we focused our plan in raising the educational and health standards of the community, as well as the external image of Abamkwam that the school will provide to all that visit it (especially since it is the first building we see when entering the village).Regarding the internal organization of the program in the field, our intention is to build the classroom blocks in a way that they define the ground of the school without enclosure it as for the school to be a ground of large horizons and not an isolated space for learning. However, the classrooms should have sufficient distance from the village so the noise won’t interfere with the classes. Also, the entrances of different classrooms should face one another and create smaller outdoor spaces so that children from different grades will interact with each other inside the school. Services as the library, the water infrastructure and the health care/teachers’ room should face the village to encourage the community to use these facilities. Plus, the latrines, the canteen and water infrastructure should be designed in a way that promotes personal and collective hygiene procedures.

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Which shall be the building system?

Considering the cooperation between the two countries and the cultural exchange, the building system should take advantage of the best of the two worlds: the traditional local practices, that have good response to climate demands and promote an effective use of local resources, and the technological upgrade provided by our technologies, tested with experimental essays on laboratory. The system must be affordable and have low maintenance economical costs, allowing, at the same time, the use of traditional local practices, such as earth renders and paintings. After the first module is built, with technical support, is should be easily replicable and taught by the local workers, in order to uphold a sustainable development. Flexibility is a construction imperative: the building system will be easily adaptable to different and unexpected land configurations or program distributions.

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How will it be built?

The building program will be divided in two different moments. The first one, in cooperation with portuguese students, will take place during the summer break and will consist in a research on local materials and building techniques, experimentation with scale models on school construction lab with the support of external invited technicians, definition of the construction system and experiments on possible spatial configurations and models, and drawings to communicate the idea to the Abamkwam’s community. The second moment, taking place in September in Ghana, will be formed by the discussion of the proposal and cross reference with the local resources and expectations of the community (making the necessary adjustments), the definition and planning of the phases of construction and the construction of the first classroom.

Location