Transfer School Maintenance Responsibility to the Schools

Assure longevity of community benefit and Karimu investment

Part of Karimu’s agreements with the community to perform construction projects is the requirement to maintain the investments. We see the transfer of this responsibility in three phases: 

• Phase 1: Karimu leads the monthly management and maintenance of the project and members of the community join us. In the case of the school buildings, we work with the head of schools and teachers to help them understand what to look for, how to record the incidents for tracking, and who to contact to resolve the issues. Costs of maintenance come out of the school budget provided by the government or community contribution as needed. We can track the maintenance issues in the Karimu school dashboard.

• Phase 2: As the community becomes comfortable with the process, we move to phase 2 where members of the community lead the management and maintenance and Karimu supports them and oversees the process. We gradually reduce the frequency of our maintenance checks from monthly, to every other month, to quarterly to ensure the work is being done well and provide feedback to them. 

• Phase 3: When it becomes clear that the members don't need our involvement anymore, we move to phase 3. In phase 3, Karimu has transferred all maintenance to the community and Karimu is not involved at all. 

We are in phase 2 of the school maintenance. In 2019 and 2020 we had mixed results in resolving school maintenance issues resulting in an average of 108 days and 102 day respectively to resolve issues. Our Memorandum of Understanding requires more timely resolution, so we asked the schools to come up with a process that meets both our needs. Ayalagaya schools together with village leadership revised the process for monitoring, repairing, and communicating how Karimu-built school assets are being maintained while giving the schools more autonomy in the process. Teachers are now assigned assets to monitor e.g. a classroom or supplies. Repairs costing less than $45 will be completed within 30 days as they can be accommodated within the school discretionary funds while larger repairs will require community contribution and will take 2 months. We are very pleased with the improved timeliness of resolution. We provided a phone for each school and they now transmit their incident activity electronically. In 2021 and 2022 the schools overall are performing well against their 30 days time to fix goals. 

As of year end 2022, all Ayalagaya schools had zero open incidents except for Ayalagaya Secondary with 10.

And notably, in November 2021, Dareda Kati Primary won 3rd place in the National Competition for the cleanest school among 18,200 schools!

Benefits:

• Longevity of school building infrastructure

• Community independence and ownership of Karimu-built school structures

Cost:

• Karimu - $1,000.00

• Community - Costs of all maintenance