04.02.10
The Danish Refugee Council has just completed eight new classrooms for the Fassei Primary School in Western Darfur. The classrooms are building bridges between children of the volatile province, and at the same time built with the environment in mind.
The Danish Refugee Council (DRC) has been able to build the new classrooms with funding from UNHCR and training and brick building technology from Habitat (UNHABITAT). The new classrooms ensure that the 900 pupils attending the Fassei Primary School no longer have to study in the open.
“The village of Fassei is the domicile to both Arab and African tribes as are many of the other rural areas where DRC work. By providing schools and classrooms we further strengthen the welfare of the rural communities and encourage the families to remain where they are, living in peaceful coexistence,” says Charles Mac Fadden, Head of Operations DRC, Sudan.
Since 2005, DRC has supported some 75 schools and constructed or rehabilitated 300 plus classrooms. The school building and reconstruction is carefully planned in order for it not to further exhaust the natural resources in Darfur, and particularly the use of firewood.
“The brick technology provides environmentally friendly bricks made out of sand, cement and earth. They are sun dried and, hence, do not require to be blasted in kilns which use extensive quantities of firewood. We trained 60 unemployed youths over two weeks and the 33,000 bricks required were produced in less than one month,” says Charles Mac Fadden.
DRC has over the past five years constructed or rehabilitated many school classrooms in these remote Darfurian villages with financial support from UNHCR and Danida, to ensure that the many hundreds of primary schoolchildren in Sudan's volatile West Darfur state have a proper environment in which to study.
DRC further supports the rural communities in Western Darfur with projects focusing on construction, agriculture, animal husbandry, environment, capacity building and more. The goal of this work is to encourage families to remain in the rural areas and prevent further displacement to the urban areas where thousands of displaced from the 2003 - 4 conflict are still living in camps.