Teacher on Two Wheels

Above:  Leo, an IC staffer, inspecting a new IC-built classroom

**The post below is a piece I just wrote for work.  It appears on Invisible Children’s blog.**

Every school that Invisible Children builds or renovates is more than just bricks and mortar. Each new classroom is the manifestation of countless hours of planning, of intricate processes that connect contractors, evaluators, engineers, and donors. Because IC values accountability and efficiency just as much as it values education, no part of our school construction process is taken lightly. From scouting out potential sites to post-project evaluation, a team of IC engineers and administrators from our Schools for Schools program is devoted to ensuring money is spent well and walls are made strong.

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The classroom, flooded with light, was so bright and clean it took on a sterile feel. The faint smell of fresh paint still hung in the sunlit air. The juxtaposition between it and the rooms in the surrounding classroom blocks, aging buildings tattooed with blooming swaths of mold and water stains, was striking.  Christo, the head of IC’s engineering team, wanted our impressions of the place.

“The windows look great, but the red trim around the ceiling is kind of odd,” I said, honestly. I didn’t know what else to comment on–my only past construction experience involved a pile of Legos when I was in the fifth grade. I apologized to Christo. “Sorry, I don’t know if I should be looking for cracks in things or–”

“No, it’s OK. You just need to think about the general feeling of these buildings, about whether these contractors did professional work. You don’t need to be an expert,” Christo explained.

Four of us pushed through the midday heat to evaluate different Schools for Schools projects–classrooms, latrines, water tanks. With not a single professional contractor among us, we still were qualified enough to complete the third and final post-project evaluation for Christo: the lay person evaluation.

Above:  Checking out a new school water tank

You see, when a building is finished, IC conducts three different evaluations–one done by a technical crew, one done by administrators, and one done by regular folks like me–to see how successful contractors were in meeting IC’s objectives. The results of these evaluations are used to determine whether or not we use a contractor again in the future. Great work equates to new contracts; mediocre work sends contractors packing. Over time, this culling process leaves IC with a small group of time-tested, professional contractors.

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Before I sat down with James, the Assistant Program Manager for Schools for Schools, to hear about how IC builds its partner schools, I thought I knew how much work went into raising a new classroom. Thirty minutes later, after James had given me an abridged overview of the construction process from start to finish, I realized how little I knew.

Not a single brick is made until Schools for Schools ‘pre-qualifies’ its contractors. In order to achieve pre-qualified status, contractors must submit a 200+ page document to IC that highlights their technical abilities, work history, financial capacity, size of on-site staff, and whether or not they are a legally registered company. Schools for Schools staff read through these documents to determine a contractor’s eligibility for pre-qualification. Once a contractor is pre-qualified, it is eligible to enter the bidding process.

Schools for Schools accepts at least 10 bids for every project it starts. This large bid pool ensures that IC never pays anything other than a fair price. (IC engineers also create a price estimate; all bids are measured against this estimate.) Once the bid pool is narrowed down to three contractors, a contract committee, chaired by our Ugandan Country Director, reviews the bids and chooses a winning contractor.

Once a contractor wins a bid and signs a contract, it must pay 5% of the total bid price as a ‘retention fee’. IC holds this fee for six months after a project has finished as a kind of security payment. OK, so the retention fee works like this: Let’s say a school is finished, but after three months, cracks appear in a classroom’s walls. IC calls the contractor and asks it to fix the cracks. The contractor, because it wants its retention fee back, goes out to the school and makes repairs. For six months after the end of a project, IC can call a contractor at any time to come back for more work.

As contractors build, they are never left to do the work without supervision. IC engineers are on-site as supervisors three days a week to monitor progress.  Sometimes IC hires site supervisors to sleep on-site for more difficult stages of projects (pouring foundations, etc.) to oversee critical work. Even though contractors know what they’re doing, our engineers can often give them in-progress tips to keep things as smooth and straight as we need them to be.  And if an element of a project ever veers off course, even the slightest bit, site supervisors are there to help get things back on track.

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Essentially, IC does everything in its power to guarantee quality. That’s what it all boils down to:  IC takes on mountains of behind-the-scenes work to bring high quality improvements to each and every one of our partner schools. Because Schools for Schools designs buildings meant to last, and because we have vowed to spend every donor dollar as efficiently as possible, IC is dotting the hills outside of Gulu with schools that are worthy of their students–bright, solid spaces deserving of the hopes and futures they shelter.

Above:  Heading to inspect the rain water collection system at Gulu High’s new IC-built girls dormitory.