MENFP Practical Guide to School Infrastructure

MENFP's practical guide to school construction, April 2020 version: the norms, standard plans and recommendations for building, rehabilitating and maintaining schools in Haiti. It belongs to a series of reference documents and sits between the binding norms and what actually gets built, which is where school construction in Haiti tends to fail.

The guide works from standard plans rather than principles, so a builder can follow it: urban and rural models, single-storey and multi-storey, reinforced concrete shear-wall construction among them. The cover example is the École Nationale Argentine Bellegarde in Port-au-Prince, a multi-storey urban model in reinforced concrete, built by FAES with IDB financing and inaugurated in 2017. Because Haiti's school stock is overwhelmingly non-public and often built without qualified supervision, a guide of standard plans is the practical instrument for raising what gets built, and the norms it applies are the seismic and cyclone requirements the 2010 earthquake made unavoidable.