Rebuild the library the floods took at Kaptagat Primary

A metre of water and four thousand books

The long rains in April put a metre of water through the lower half of Kaptagat Primary. The classrooms dried out in a fortnight. The library, which sat at the bottom of the slope because that is where there was room to build it in 2009, did not — the shelving collapsed, and of roughly four thousand books, about six hundred were salvageable.

Since then the school has run a reading room out of a donated shipping container. It holds maybe forty children at a squeeze, it is unbearably hot by ten in the morning, and it is the only reading space for six hundred pupils.

Rebuilding it somewhere sensible

The rebuild moves the library forty metres uphill onto the compacted ground beside the head teacher's office, on a raised plinth with a proper drainage channel behind it. It is a single room, thirty-six square metres, with louvred ventilation because the container has taught everyone a lot about heat. It will hold four thousand books and about fifty children at a time.

• Built uphill on a 600mm plinth with a cut-off drain, on ground that stayed dry in April.
• Thirty-six square metres, cross-ventilated, with steel shelving rather than timber this time.
• Restocking 3,400 books, over half of them in Kiswahili and Kalenjin rather than only English.
• Built by local contractors with school labour on the unskilled work, as the community asked.

The rebuild budget

The school community has already committed the labour for the groundworks and about $1,900 in materials raised locally. This is the rest.

• $6,300 — Structure, roof and plinth Block walls, iron sheet roof, and the raised plinth that is the entire point of moving it.
• $3,400 — Books, 3,400 volumes Restocking through a Nairobi supplier, with over half the collection in Kiswahili and Kalenjin.
• $2,600 — Steel shelving and furniture Steel this time. The timber shelving did not survive and would not survive the next one either.
• $1,900 — Drainage works A cut-off drain above the building and a channel down the east side, which the school will maintain.
• $1,450 — Windows, doors and security grilles Louvred windows for cross-ventilation, and grilles because four thousand books is a lot of value in a rural school.
• $1,100 — Contingency, transport and platform fees Getting materials up the road in the wet season costs more than anyone expects.

The container holds forty children if they do not mind touching. There are six hundred pupils in this school and the youngest ones have simply stopped getting a turn.

Who is behind this

Kaptagat Primary is one of Broadfield School Trust's two partner schools in Kenya, a relationship that started with a teacher exchange in 2019 and has since run to a water tank and a set of classroom repairs. The build is managed by the school's own committee with a local contractor they have used before; the trust holds and disburses the funds against invoices, and the head teacher signs off each stage. Nothing here is designed in Leeds.

Risks and challenges

The obvious risk is that it floods again, and the honest answer is that it might — the April rains were the worst in about fifteen years but not unrepeatable. What we can do is build on ground that stayed dry, raise the floor 600mm, and put a cut-off drain above it, which together handle a repeat of April with room to spare. The second risk is the building season: work has to be substantially complete before the short rains, and a delay in materials reaching Kaptagat would push the whole thing into next year. Book prices have risen about twelve per cent in a year and if that continues we will buy 3,000 volumes rather than 3,400 rather than cutting the drainage.