Facilitate Construction Progress

Our primary role in the construction process was to facilitate communication between the community and the contractors, and facilitate organising community labour. There are four community labour teams: demolishing, cleaning, compacting, and erecting.  A Community Liaison Officer (CLO) selected from the community oversees all of these teams.  The job of the CLO is to manage which community members work when, and serve as the point of contact between the contractors and community.

The most important part of the CLO role is in helping to ensure that people have enough money saved to pay for their new shack. For many residents, the income from working on reblocking is the only source of payment for their upgraded shack. For this reason, the order of work has to be adjusted around the phases of construction to allow community members to pay for their structure at the correct time. The role of the WPI team in this is to assist the CLO by ensuring that they the savings and timeline information organized in order to make informed decisions. We did this facilitating a savings workshop with community leaders resulting in a detailed savings map of each shack.

We also worked to facilitate communication regarding the implementation of construction, which would consist of an initial sewer construction followed by cluster-by cluster demolition, levelling, and reconstruction. The only phase that began during our time in Flamingo was the sewer provisioning, which did require the relocation of some shacks to make space for building. This required us to work with the community to make adjustments to the layout plan, as well as consider spaces where people could be temporarily moved to if necessary.

Links

• Click here to see the scene from when we visited Kuku Town
• Click here to see the scene when we met the contractors
• Click here to see the Reblocking Guidebook that was created by WPI students in 2012