Full Proposal and Background

Project Summary
More than 80 girls at Nakpanduri Business Secondary School (N.A.B.S.S.) are in need of a dormitory facility on the school grounds. Currently, no such structure exists on campus despite the fact that more than half of the entire student body (both boys and girls) are in need of accommodation during school sessions from year to year. Since the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year, 50 girls hailing from outside Nakpanduri have stayed on mats on the floor of an overcrowded building more than two miles on the opposite side of town from the school. This facility lies in a very isolated and thickly wooded area far from the Nakpanduri town center and has no close neighbors. N.A.B.S.S. borrows the building from the local Presbyterian Church but it will be reclaimed by its owners early next year for conversion into a vocational training school. Another 30+ non-native female students, for whom there’s no room in the dormitory, stay in various parts of town with distant relatives, family friends, or renters who force them to work to earn their keep. Unfamiliar, impoverished, cramped, and often abusive, these environments are not conducive to studying and learning.

Recognizing the urgency of the situation, the school, the Board of Governors and the PTA have made plans and broken ground on the N.A.B.S.S. campus for a new girls’ dormitory. They have molded more than 3,000 cement blocks and laid the foundation using communal labor, in the process buying more than 130 bags of cement and 25 truck loads of building sand, thereby exhausting all their collective resources. The school has also paid a local landowner about $320 for the project site land. (See Background Information below for a detailed synopsis of the school’s land dispute.) In the interim, the Chief of Nakpanduri and Honourable MP Joseph Labik have secured funds and called upon the various communities to come together and build four local grass-roofed mud compounds with four rooms each to house the girls until a permanent facility is completed. Throughout this process, the school has scraped together resources to offer food to those from the community who have volunteered their services, and many of the students themselves (especially the girls) have contributed by fetching buckets of water needed to make the bricks. All remaining labor for the project will be similarly performed by school staff and members of the community. Upon completion of a girls’ dormitory, more than 100 male N.A.B.S.S. students, many staying away from school in similarly borrowed rooms, will move into these mud structures until they too can get their own permanent housing facility.

The Bunkpurugu/Yunyoo District has already contributed, most recently paying about $7,100 (a half payment to settle a dispute that goes back more than five years – see Background Information below) to owners of the school’s land so that development can continue. The district and Honourable MP Joseph Labik have also been able to secure donor funding for the construction of a borehole which would provide a desperately needed source of drinking water at N.A.B.S.S. once the girls move in, and have sunk a large sum on the completion of an unfinished classroom block. Furthermore, the school has for the past five years been connected to the national electrical grid and 10 electrical poles lay in waiting next to the administration block, ready to equip any new structures with power. Despite the valiant efforts of all parties involved, the school needs financial assistance in order to continue work.

N.A.B.S.S., the school’s Board of Governors and the PTA seek PCPP assistance to finish the girls’ dormitory on campus. They duly pledge their full and most concerted commitment to provide all the labor and see the project to a successful completion. The girls of N.A.B.S.S. need a place to stay and they need it quickly. A dormitory on campus with enough space to house all the female students in the currently borrowed facility and those without immediate family in Nakpanduri will fulfill an urgent and desperate need. These students need a safe living and learning space, a place where they’ll be under the close watch of the school and closer to the community, and where they’ll have ready access to the school’s resources (i.e. classrooms, the library, the computer room, and evening educational and entertainment events). The successful construction of a girls’ dormitory on campus will serve as a revitalizing jumpstart to the overall development of N.A.B.S.S., offering the promise of more projects to come and hopeful encouragement to students and to the whole community of Nakpanduri.

Background Information
With the inception of educational reforms establishing the Junior Secondary and the Senior Secondary School System in Ghana, junior secondary school graduates in the Nakpanduri area found difficulties gaining admission to senior secondary schools under stiff regional competition. Many of them were thus compelled to end their schooling. This prompted the then member of parliament Honorable Joseph Y. Labik of the Bunkpurugu/Yunyoo Constituency (now the Bunkpurugu/Yunyoo District Assembly) to negotiate with the minister of education to establish a senior secondary school in Nakpanduri.

The Ghana Education Service established Nakpanduri Business Secondary School (N.A.B.S.S.) in April 1996 with 108 students and 4 teachers on staff in a borrowed school block of the Assemblies of God Junior Secondary School. In January 1997, the school was moved to two renovated grain storage buildings of the former Agriculture Station on the Nakpanduri-Bawku Road. Finally on the eighth of July, 2002, with the student population growing rapidly, the school moved to its current premises southwest of town on the Nakpanduri-Nalerigu Road.

Since moving in 2002, neither the school nor the Bunkpurugu/Yunyoo District has ever possessed title to the land where N.A.B.S.S. rests. A dispute between the land owners and the district has protracted in recent years and efforts to continue building on the mostly undeveloped site have been stymied by owners angry at not having received promised compensation. In one incident, a contractor in the process of building a six-unit classroom block was driven away and has since never returned. Then two years ago, after an apparent agreement by the district to compensate the land owners was broken, the school’s recently leveled football pitch was plowed so the owners could resume farming on the land. Finally, in October 2006 a settlement was reached and the district made a half payment of about $7,100 to the land owners. In addition, one land owner was paid $320 on top of his share of the $7,100 to assure that his particular portion of the land could be used for the construction of a girls’ dormitory without interference (the receipt of this payment is attached to this proposal). The final payment from the district is forthcoming, but will not pose a problem to this hostel project if delayed, because of the aforementioned payment to the land owner.

The school’s current infrastructure includes a three-classroom block, an unfinished six-classroom block (left largely untouched for the last four years due to an intransigent contractor), two staff bungalows, and a small administrative block containing four offices, a staff common room, and a small library and computer room. The school borrows five classrooms from the Assemblies of God Primary and Junior Secondary Schools across the road from the N.A.B.S.S. campus. The school runs two programmes: General Arts and Business. The five mandatory “core subjects” are English Language, Mathematics, Social Studies, Economics, and Integrated Science. In addition to these subjects, students pursuing General Arts take Government, History, Literature, and French Language. Business students balance out their schedule with classes in Financial Accounting, Principles of Costing, and Business Management.

The school has a current population of 390 students (270 boys and 120 girls), more than 200 of whom are not natives of Nakpanduri and would benefit from accommodation on the school grounds. No structures for housing students currently exist at N.A.B.S.S. N.A.B.S.S. is officially designated as a “day school” by the standards of the Ghana Education Service (G.E.S.). This designation implies that students commute to and from school each day and do not stay at the school. In reality, N.A.B.S.S. is a boarding school: most of its students come from outside Nakpanduri and need a place to stay while in school. Achieving official G.E.S. “boarding status” would mean the receipt of generous yearly room and board funding and infrastructure development assistance from the national government. “Day schools” with the necessary facilities can apply to become a “boarding school” if and only if they have the necessary infrastructure to house and feed students.

The girls and boys hostels (dormitories) the school has borrowed for the last several years house more than 100 girls and boys far from the school in wooded areas on the other side of town. As mentioned, 50 girls stay in a building belonging to the Presbyterian Church. Across the road, 50 boys stay in the two run-down buildings which formerly housed N.A.B.S.S.’s only classrooms and before that served as grain storage facilities. It is anticipated that within the next few years, these buildings will also be reclaimed by their owners, creating another housing predicament at N.A.B.S.S.

Statement of Need
As stated in the preceding pages, Nakpanduri Business Secondary School, the N.A.B.S.S. PTA, and 80 girls at N.A.B.S.S. need housing. The hostel in town where some of the girls currently stay is being repossessed by the Nakpanduri Presbyterian Church; furthermore, that facility was far away from school, overcrowded, and unsafe. The area surrounding the current hostel boasts of tse-tse flies, malarial mosquito hot-spots, venomous snakes, and the threat of break-ins – two occurred during the 2006-2007 school year where students lost personal belongings, food stuffs, and money intended for the payment of school fees. Besides the girls residing in the current hostel, N.A.B.S.S. girls living in town are hardly in a good learning environment. The safety needs and educational/holistic benefits of having all the girls together in a well constructed permanent hostel on the N.A.B.S.S. campus plainly justify the need stated in this proposal and currently being addressed in full measure by the school and PTA.

Goals and objectives
The community has identified the following specific goals and objectives in order of priority:

1. Provide a safe living space for 80 female students on the school grounds
· N.A.B.S.S. and the PTA will finish the construction of four four-bedroom mud structures on campus to temporarily house the girls by the end of August, 2007
· N.A.B.S.S. will later use the mud structures to house a group of boy students who will soon find themselves in a similar predicament.

2. Finish the hostel substructure
N.A.B.S.S. and the PTA will utilize the completed plans and all materials purchased – at a cost of $3,982.94 to finish the base structure of the hostel.
· N.A.B.S.S. and the PTA will pay a local mason and carpenter to lead the project work, then use only staff and community labor throughout the project. N.A.B.S.S. and the PTA will incur all labor costs for the project at a value of $3,223.88

3. Finish the hostel superstructure, roofing, and finishing work
· Utilizing PCPP funding of $2,130.60, N.A.B.S.S. and the PTA will purchase remaining materials and complete the carpentry and masonry work on the superstructure of the hostel.
· N.A.B.S.S. and the PTA will purchase roofing lumber, aluminum sheets, and nails using $4,447.76 of PCPP funds to roof the hostel.
· Utilizing PCPP funding of $5,059.49, N.A.B.S.S. and the PTA will purchase remaining materials and complete the walls, floors, security bars and other finishing work on the hostel.

Method
Work is already underway on the substructure of the girls’ dormitory (see figures 5.5 and 6.5 below). All materials have been purchased and that work will be completed by the end of September – well before the time this volunteer returns to Nakpanduri. The Chairman of the PTA, Mr. Mahama M. Emmanuel, along with his treasurer and the N.A.B.S.S. staff have pledged to see this stage of the project to completion (see attached assurance letter). In the meantime, the girls will be safely housed in the temporary mud structures at the school.

Once PCPP funding is acquired – hopefully by December 2007, PCVL Carl Allen will be in charge of dispensing the funds and monitoring the work from his new station in Tamale. Those running the project in Nakpanduri will be in constant contact with Carl and will come to Tamale where Carl will accompany them to dispense funds for all purchases – most of which will be made in Tamale. Each project phase is estimated to take no more than one month beginning from January 2008, which means the project should be completed by the end of March 2008.

Monitoring and Evaluation
PCVL Carl Allen will make periodic trips to Nakpanduri throughout the duration of the project to ensure work is moving along and to help troubleshoot any unforeseen difficulties. He will also remain in weekly communication with the school and PTA via mobile phone. Peace Corps and all donor parties will be kept abreast of the project status throughout. On each of his trips, Carl will take photographs of the project site to show Peace Corps and all donors.

During the finishing stages and once the dormitory is completed, PCVL Carl Allen will actively engage with the school, the PTA, and especially the girls themselves to make sure the facility meets their needs. Success in this endeavour will be measured by the satisfaction of the girls living in the hostel and that of the whole school and Nakpanduri community. Their improved living conditions, safety, morale, and – hopefully – academic performance will be testament to a truly met need.