'Earth bag technology' proposed for building schools

Deficiency in school infrastructure has been one of the economic consequences of widespread poverty in the Philippines. The problem is further aggravated by lack of government support and subsidy. An inadequate portion of the national budget is allocated to the education sector. Although the Department of Education receives the biggest chunk off our annual budget that is 12.5%, it is still the smallest in the region. Other countries in the region allocate 20% of their budget for education. Also, the education budget has not increased significantly for the past ten years to match the ever-increasing student population.

An estimate of 12,000 classrooms have to be built in order to hold all public school students in the country. This does not consider those classrooms that are in constant need of repair because of the building materials that depreciate rapidly in tropical weather. If government funds and traditional means of construction will be relied on to solve this problem, it will may take forever.

My Shelter Foundation headed by Illac Diaz as executive director proposes a revolutionary yet inexpensive technology of building structures to respond to the growing need for classrooms in the rural areas. This new architecture is for people who need educational facilities but cannot afford an architect, cannot afford manufactured materials, cannot afford electricity to cool their facilities, cannot afford anything but their own hands and the earth beneath their feet. It is an architecture for all such that any community should be able to construct a classroom for educating their children with the simplest material available to all; earth. It is also a good option for areas in the Philippines affected by natural calamities to rebuild houses and schools faster and more economically.

Classrooms-in-a-Box is an easy to transport integrated system to build a 120 square meter facility with chairs that will be put into a 3 x 1.5 meter container that is intended to be a complete self build-system designed to enable people to construct their own classrooms with simple machines and locally available materials. These contain 2,000 meters of polypropylene elongated tubular sacks, instruction materials and tested building plans, tamping rods, soil sifters, shovels, a guides, and barbed wire. Once on site, these classrooms will be built using rice bags filled with earth, sand, a small portion of cement or bagasse ash and lime, piled on top of each other and fastened by tensile barbed wires. Structures are plastered with a similar mix after the foundation and sandbags are in place.

This earth bag technology is 40%-60% cheaper than traditional building techniques. Moreover, these classrooms have specially-designed wind-catchers that traps the breeze from the outside and circulates the cooler air within the rooms, reversing the current trend of classrooms to be like ovens during hot summer months or dependant on electrical appliances to lower the ambient temperatures. It is also faster to build, taking only a matter of three to four weeks. Citizens in the community are encouraged to actively participate in the building to provide a school structure for their children for a fraction of the cost of building using traditional means.

A community should be able to learn the techniques, find the appropriate piece of land, and then with some water, affordable binders and simple tools build themselves a school using earth beneath their feet. This simple yet profound technology exists today.

These design pass building codes of the (ICBO) International Conference of Building Officials, are earthquake, fire, weather resistant. The designs are eco-friendly by requiring less transportation, manufacture, energy usage than conventional construction methods. This system also impacts the communities positively by increasing the supply of money by sourcing cheaper materials and paying labor locally rather than more externally sourced manufactured materials and contractors.

The technology has applied in building school structures in Escalante City, Negros Occidental. At the moment, the My Shelter Foundation is building more classrooms in Surigao del Norte that are set to be finished this middle of July.

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*This is the official press release from My Shelter Foundation. The technology will be launched on July 13, 11:30am in the Asian School of Management.