Communities without formal training and professional
experience cannot be required to take on the technical
oversight and moral responsibility of ensuring schools
are constructed safely. Ensuring safety remains the
responsibilty of the implementing agency.
• Community management: High community
involvement. School management committees may
manage construction projects directly. This strategy
assumes the committee oversees all construction
management roles, including purchase of material, hiring
of skilled tradespeople and unskilled labourers, and
day-to-day execution. However, it is fundamental for the
committee have technical support. A community leader
without formal training and professional experience cannot
be required to take on the technical oversight or the
responsibility of ensuring schools are constructed safely.
When this strategy is used, the program manager should
ensure the school management committee has the
support of qualified technical people, such as third-party
engineers, as discussed in the Construction Stage. These
people should provide technical guidance, ensuring
construction monitoring is robust and that the instalments
of funds are released only after monitoring shows the
construction is compliant with the design.
• Contractor management: Moderate community
involvement. Other strategies of community-based
safer school construction engage the school community
to a lesser extent. The program manager or school
management committee may put the construction out
for tender and select a contractor. These contractors are
often community residents with professional construction
management experience. The hired contractor carries out
the construction of core structural components. A wider
number of community members may participate in some
construction tasks that are not directly tied to structural
safety.
The school management committee should still be part
of construction monitoring and serve as a local reporting
body for construction progress.
In an alternative approach to contractor management, a
school management committee may hire a local labour
contractor but retain the responsibility of purchasing
materials.
• Agency direct build: Low community involvement.
In some situations, development actors or government
agencies may retain considerable control over the
construction process. They may hire the contractor or
use trained in-house contractors. This strategy may
be desirable when speed is essential, when they are
managing a program with many school construction
projects, or when community familiarity with the selected
construction technology is particularly low (see In context:
Building back better in the Community Design Stage
RESOURCE BOX
Resources on communitybased project management
The 2013 Catholic Relief
Services’ How-To Guide for
Managing Post-Disaster
(Re)-Construction Projects
provides detailed advice for
and successful examples of
owner-driven and contractorbuilt construction using a
community-based approach.
For each type of construction,
the guide covers important
topics such as procurement, tendering, scheduling,
construction monitoring, payment procedures,
project completion and required staff for successful
construction projects.
Although focused on
post-disaster housing
reconstruction, Safer Homes,
Stronger Communities: A
Handbook for Reconstructing
Housing and Communities
after Natural Disasters,
published by the World
Bank and the GFDRR,
offers an overview on
project governance and
accountability action plans. Such plans can support
transparency and reduce corruption in large-scale
construction projects.
section and the Section 1 case study on Haiti for examples
of this approach).
SECTION III: DESIGN
Moral responsibility for safety
Even when a direct-build strategy is used, the program
manager should retain some aspects of the communitybased approach to maximise hazard awareness. Local
community members may still provide a portion of
unskilled labour to boost their income and build a sense
of ownership. More familiar aspects of the construction
should be subcontracted to local tradespeople if
available. The sch ool management committee and others
should support the non-technical aspects of construction
monitoring. These tasks should be selected in ways
that build community familiarity with hazard-resistant
construction and, ideally, enhance their capacity to use it
in their community.
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