• Speed versus quantity. Construction speed and cost
versus building lifespan – to build semi-permanent or
permanent?
• Quality versus speed. A consistent design for better
compliance to safety standards and streamlined
construction versus design diversity for increased
functionality and tailoring to specific site characteristics.
• Cost versus quantity. Higher costs of site-specific
design versus the economy of scale that comes with a
consistent design template.
• Quantity versus quality. Breadth of school construction
versus depth of community engagement – creating
community “ownership” versus building more schools.
These conflicting considerations can be conceptualised
by the project diamond: prioritising time, cost, quantity or
quality can only be achieved at the cost of other factors.
Speed
Budget
Haiti government through a protracted process, meaning
the first schools were completed in June 2011 and the last
schools in early 2013, three years after the earthquake.
Initially, the short-term strategy made sense, but navigating
the economic and political environment took so much time
that the original argument for speed decayed. This left
Save the Children with two key lessons about trade-offs in
construction lifespan: the staff needed a shared definition
of ‘semi-permanent’, and a well-communicated plan for
upgrading schools to permanent structures when they
degraded.
SECTION I: INTRODUCTION
Key decisions or trade-offs:
Ensure technical oversight and
engage as partners
Many school construction projects functioned well with
the standardised building footprint, while some required
compromise to achieve sufficient classroom numbers.
In the latter cases, school administrators made ad-hoc
changes, some of which compromised safety and classroom
function. A five-way memorandum of understanding
(MOU) was established in an attempt to mitigate these
changes. The MOU provided written agreement of roles and
responsibilities of each stakeholder in advance, including
school staff, MoE, Save the Children, the municipality and
the local Parent-Teacher Association (PTA).
Quality
Quantity
Many of the key trade-offs were made at the design stage,
which in turn dictated the programmatic decisions that
followed. Save the Children opted for a standardised school
design and a semi-permanent structure in an attempt to
optimise donor expectations for an immediate response,
speed and cost.
Schools were all single-story with 190-cm-high reinforced concrete
skirt walls. The walls were topped with timber framing and clad with
plywood. Corrugated metal was used for the roof.
Graphic: Save the Children.
A semi-permanent lifespan was seen as a middle ground.
Donors were less inclined to lend money for permanent
structures when the country was in the emergency and
immediate recovery phase. Save the Children had its
own goal to build a certain quota of schools and were
contractually obligated to achieve those numbers. The
Haitian MoE was also requesting temporary, immediate
construction. Even as they drafted the design, they
recognised that some building elements, in particular
the plywood cladding, would require maintenance and
replacement.
The semi-permanent school design was approved by the
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