The project was born in collaboration with the NGO Africa’70, which has operated in Saharawi refugee camp of Rabuni since 2002 with several projects centered on cattle-breeding support, animal health and stray dogs control.

The school includes several didactic spaces (library, classrooms, clinic) as well as a few rooms to host local and foreign students, teachers and Africa’70 staff , for a total floor surface of approximately 500 sqm.

After the school was built, ASF-Italia explored the possibility to conduct further research on the use of adobe and other alternatives modes of construction, foreseeing the possibility to build a small prototype structure together with the local community, to be included in the veterinary school.

As a solidarity project, this building has been made in cooperation with a local organization of young people living in Sabalibougou, a Bamako neighborhood in Mali and two social workers organizations in France. 12 French adolescents were sent from a Paris suburb to participate in the construction of these three classrooms.

The task for ASF was mainly to help choosing the right place to do it, to draw the mainline of the project and to assist the French organizations in their work.

Main goal of the project is supporting the activities that our counterpart has been carrying out since 1994 in the area of innovative, sustainable, integrated and ecological techniques for agriculture and farming. It consists in the construction of an educational institution where these activities could be carried out in better conditions.

The range of activities as well as of people who can benefit from them is extended. In addition, a capacity building centre will be created by adding the following to the already existing facilities (a lot surrounded by a stone wall with a dairy, a bedroom for the warden and a warehouse):

1 hangar with a capacity for 30 persons to be used as a polyvalent space for courses, meetings, lectures, etc.

3 double bedrooms for guest teachers, etc.

1 kitchen/warehouse

1 communal room for 25 persons to host people attending seminars, etc.

6 latrines and 4 shower facilities.

All facilities will be furnished with a basic electrical installation powered by photovoltaic panels.

The project is located in the small village of Bingo, province of Bulkiemdé, 40 km to the west of Ouagadougou, the capital city of Burkina Faso. Bingo has a total population of ca. 2000 inhabitants, but the area of influence of the whole project extends to the villages of Sa and Kaliguiri, with a total of 2000 inhabitants, and five other smaller villages, totalling 2000 more inhabitants altogether.

The project has the general purpose to fight against the increasing analphabetism, unemployment and underdevelopment, plagues that hit young people above all. This plan is part of a project aimed to increase scholarship rates, led by the local partner who acts in the name of the Diocese of “Thumbe”. The project implies the construction of a secondary school centre in an area without any schools for 80 km, where roads are extremely difficult to move on.

Together with the local population and its local partner, ASF Onlus elaborated the following project:

a) construction of an autonomous school complex made of a building with 6 classrooms for 540 students from twelve to eighteen years old and of another building for offices and the direction for the head master

b) building of houses for 18 teachers

c) realization of a well to take out of the water from the underearth stratum

d) being in acquaintance with professional activities linked to building and manufacturing fields through the promotion and realization of professional training, but also through the direct participation of local people in the construction of the buildings themselves as well as in the creation of the furniture for them.

The methodology adopted for the improvement of the different activities of the project is generally based on a strongly communitarian approach and has the purpose of increasing the local cultural and professional abilities, with the aim of creating autonomous capabilities and putting the bases of development for the direct and undirect beneficiaries.

ASF-Sweden engages in a project of cooperation with the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, which since 1996 has been restoring the ancient fabric and upgrading the infrastructure of the Old Town of Hebron - one of the oldest cities in the world and a cultural heritage for humanity. The aim of the committee’s work is to safeguard Hebron’s architectural heritage, but also to revive traditional craftsmanship, create jobs and allow the inhabitants to stay in their city.

Since several decades, the presence of militant Israeli Jewish settlers in Hebron’s Old Town is a threat to its physical and social survival. Houses are demolished and emptied, and vital streets closed for Palestinians. The inhabitants are expelled or trapped-in, shops closed forcibly or by lack of access, children attacked on their way to school. In this everyday situation the Hebron Rehabilitation Committee work to rehabilitate and restore the houses and to graduate the infrastructure in the Old City.

The role of ASF-Sweden is to spread information about the situation in Hebron and the valuable work of HRC, and to contribute with Swedish experiences of integrating a child perspective in urban planning (start in 2010, end 2012). Methods developed in Sweden by experts, and experiences from practical work of Swedish architects, will be adapted to the local context together with the HRC staff in recurrent workshop sessions in Hebron, in which children from schools of the Old City will participate. The goal is making the child perspective a natural part of the work process of HRC. The project will be followed up and evaluated by HRC, ASF-Sweden and Sida, to see if this cooperation could be further developed and/or applied in other places in Palestine or elsewhere.

As a test project, ASF and HRC have become partners in a cooperation with three universities in Sweden (KTH, LTH and Alnarp), tutoring and supporting four students that have made their master diploma work in Hebron. The common theme for all students is making proposals for buildings, places and/or town/landscaping in Hebron Old City, with a strong child perspective in mind. A presentation by the students will be held in Hebron in November 2009. By the beginning of 2010, the outcome will be subject to evaluation by ASF and HRC.

Figuig is a pre-saharian oasis which has been undergoing for several years the negative effects of its frontier position. The political instability and the socio-economical problems bound to the closure of the frontiers between Morocco and Algeria have limited the possibility of commercial and touristic activities, while favoring the flux of clandestine goods that strongly compete with both local products and legally imported ones.

Although the region has a high potential due to natural resources, richness of landscape sand biodiversity; although the strategic position could favor relations of vicinity with bothMediterranean and Saharan territories, Figuig has been unable in recent times to play any relevant role in the national economy.

The city is characterized by a specific spatial arrangement made of an interwoven constellation of seven separate Ksurs (neighborhoods), each linked to one or several palm-groves. This spatial and cultural structure is now disappearing due to the abandonment of the historical centers and to the construction of new dispersed settlements around them. Most important, the ungoverned expansion of settlements is causing a great amount of urban management problems, mainly consisting in the lack of infrastructural links and in the uneven distribution of public services and welfare provisions.

Given such a problematic background, Africa'70 elaborated a rehabilitation project on thehistorical heritage of the oasis in conjunction with several local associations, pursuing the amelioration of the living conditions of Figuig's inhabitants through a number of initiatives addressing the poor conditions of its built environment.

The role of ASF-Italia: the final objective of ASF's work is to trace a methodological path on how to elaborate the strategic plans that are necessary for a sustainable governance of Figuig's territory. The first on-field investigation was conducted in October 2005, aimed toshed light on the recent evolution of Figuig's urban fabric. Relief maps were drawn on each Ksur, highlighting the numerous factors that contribute to their specificity and the most evident problems in the state of conservation of the buildings and the urban fabrics, together with problems generated by the casual introduction of inappropriate building techniques.

Short term perspectives: a few pilot construction-sites will start, aimed to restore some keybuildings in cooperation with local manufacturers. The objective is to enable local craftmen to independently restore, transform and maintain the built heritage of the oasis by freelyresorting to a variety of appropriate construction methods.

The psychiatric district “Telema” in Kinshasa was conceived as a hospital with the aim to assist the patients affected by mental problems and to give informative support to the families. The project of reconstruction and enlargement of “Telema” emerged from the necessity to adapt the structure to the changed requirements: from local it has become a reference point at national level with users from many regions.

The project objective is to receive and put into practice suitable technical solutions and technologies and the dynamics related to the management and development of the hospital, respecting traditional construction and cooperating with the technical skills of local enterprises. Considering this, the results have been: reorganization of the psychiatric district and related services, in particular flexibility and sustainability of the operation; solution of the energy emergency (continuity in electric energy supply) and hygienic sanitary (treatment and disposing the refuses); and excellent social environmental impact of the project choices.

For Phase 2 of this project, we propose to continue supporting the National Primary School in the border town of Anse-à-Pitre in Southwest Haiti. It consists in building two more school rooms, which would add up to the four rooms already in construction, in order to reach the total number of six required for the fi rst cycle of Primary Education. It also consists in the construction of a canteen and a school orchard, plus the instruction of the APA for them to grow and cook the schoolchildren’s breakfast. Moreover, we propose to further all those activities directed toward the creation of egalitarian bonds among the people inhabiting both sides of the Dominican-Haitian border, through joint actions involving teachers, students and parents from both countries.

The whole project is part of a larger process of cross-border development to promote transnational environmental education. It puts special emphasis on the improvement of the educational infrastructures in both border towns, seen as fulcra for the expansion of a new sensibility towards the physical environment, which on the Haitian side is devastated and on the Dominican side is threatened by industrial and touristic activities, incompatible with the preservation of protected areas. The idea of a refectory furnished with cooking devices powered by solar energy is aimed at putting this special emphasis on the preservation of the environment – the use of clean energies reduces the impact of deforestation caused by the production of charcoal, which is the only existing fuel in the area.

Our project is based, therefore, on the potential capacity of instruction to impinge on a tendency which is decimating the student population in the region, while also causing serious damage to its resources and to the good understanding between the people of these two nations.

A series of works have been carried out in four hamlets in Karangasso-Vigué rural zone, in the South part of Burkina Faso (one of the world’s poorest countries) to create or complement 4 primary public schools. This project was realized together with a local association, Petit à Petit, and with school directors of this Burkina Faso zone, who have been developing in the last few years a reflection about the “ideal school”. This participative work contributed to enrich the architectonic proposal, improving teaching conditions and allowing the creation of new collective spaces for the village.

Each school is made of 3 classrooms, a library, teacher’s dwellings, school kitchen gardens, and outdoor spaces with outdoor blackboards and paillotes (lightweight construction made of timber and straw resting on metallic pillars that serves as a meeting place for the people of the township, as well as a space for a temporary dining room and shelter for the children).

All of them have been executed with low environmental impact techniques. Local resources were used in a broad process of community participation, accomplished with the support of a network of local craftsmen who contributed to train people from the villages. Around 200 persons, women and men, have participated in the work. A mixed construction was chosen for the classrooms, with metallic structures and laterite stone walls; stones were extracted from local quarries reducing transportation costs and encouraging local economy. For the teacher’s dwellings adobe bricks were employed with the earth vaults roof technique (Voûte Nubienne), using basic, readily available local materials and simple, easily appropriable procedures.

In 1998, two doctors who worked for the WHO in the Region of Naipa in the northwest of Kenia asked “Architects over Frontiers” Germany to help them to build a primary school for the region. In the follow up process “Architekten Über Grenzen” and the German Development Organization DESWOS were engaged in the school building together with financial support of the German Ministry for Development, BMZ, and the Anglican Curch of Kenia as a local partner.

In 2003, the school has been fi nished and handed over to the local partner. The school has 4 classrooms, a staff room and a directory with a base of 220 squaremetres. For a cost of all in all 35.000 Euros “Architects over Frontiers” Germany and DESWOS were able to build a school in which today nearly 500 children are getting lections from teachers paid by the State of Kenia.