Collège Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Niger

Working with Article 25, we expanded Collège Hampaté Bâ in West Africa's Niger to provide primary and secondary education for 1,200 students. The design utilises locally available materials and skills, and helps mitigate the extreme heat by using passive design principles. The project was delivered as part of our Developing Countries work, providing engineering expertise on community projects that normally can’t access this kind of assistance.

Aerial colour photo of Hampate Ba school football pitch with children playing.

Key information

Architect

Article 25

Client

Collège Amadou, Hampaté Bâ

Value

Undisclosed

Year of Completion

2021

Sector

Services

Challenge

Located in the north of Niger’s capital city Niamey, College Hampate Ba provides subsidised education to children from lower income families.

Phases 1 and 2 of the project include the design and construction of eight new classrooms, an administration building, a caretaker’s house, toilet blocks, sports facilities along with a new water tower to serve the Phase 2 secondary school and the planned future Phase 3 primary school.

We worked as part of a team with Article 25 architects and Michael Hadi structural engineers. Aspects of our work include design input into daylight, solar shading, natural ventilation and passive cooling; particularly of the classrooms, water supply, sanitation and drainage, power and lighting and lightning protection.

The classrooms have a double layer roof design, with vaulted earth brick ceilings below an outer metal roof. This helps mitigate the extreme heat as air is pulled through the void between the two roofs and heat from the sun cannot radiate into the rooms. The primary building material is laterite stone; an inexpensive, locally available material with low embodied carbon, which represents an underutilised resource in Niger. It is dug from the ground by hand in a quarry just 10km outside of Niamey, and hardens on contact with air to become suitable for building. During construction, local masons were trained in how to use laterite, with the hope that the skills can be disseminated in further projects around the region.

Our project team

Total of 3 people

Video

Quote

“It’s an excellent example of what a building should have: purpose, sense of community, designed with the idea of doing more with less. It’s clearly the type of project we should all take inspiration from.”

AIA UK Awards Jury Read more