Erongo Governor Neville Andre Itope led the commencement of the construction of a block of two classrooms at the Seaside Primary School in Walvis Bay, in celebration of his birthday, on 14 April.
The governor is leading the project, and together with his office staff are constructing the block with the assistance of different stakeholders including contractors, trainee constructors from the Community Skills Development Centre (COSDEC) as well as those who have donated the building materials.
“My office is prioritising education particularly this year because we have noticed the number of challenges faced by the region in the entire education sector, from a shortage of classrooms to textbooks.
This burden is mainly from the huge influx of people moving to the region in search of better livelihood, which obviously increases the need for more spacing in schools and everywhere else,” the governor noted.
The two classrooms will be constructed with pre-cast materials at the cost of close to N.dollars 200 000 and are expected to be completed within one week.
The governor emphasised that utilising the cheap method would assist many schools facing the same classroom shortage problem.
Compared to the traditional building material which would cost over N.dollars 2.5 million and three months to complete, construction with the pre-cast material is cheaper and faster to complete.
The Seaside Primary School was one of the schools identified by the Directorate of Education in the Region, as it has a lack of classrooms.
The School’s Acting Principal Lucinda Resandt in an interview with Nampa said the school is currently operating on a platoon system as a result of a shortage of classrooms and the initiative could not have come at a better time.
“We currently have 11 classrooms of grades 0-4 operating on the platoon and five floating teachers as there are not enough classrooms for each teacher to have their own classrooms,” she said.
Source: The Namibian Press Agency