Kwikspace partners with Limpopo DOE to serve over 900 schools

The Limpopo Department of Education has awarded a three-year contract for new modular buildings to Kwikspace. The company will manufacture and deliver brand new units, and relocate existing modular units to over 900 schools throughout Limpopo’s Sekhukhune district over the period. The deployment of these units forms part of the Limpopo Province’s three-year expansion project to increase school capacity throughout the province, which comprises five districts.

For the 2019/2020 financial year, 36 double-wide Kwikspace units have been constructed and delivered to 12 schools around the district. An additional 124 new units will be delivered to 35 schools up to March 2020, and 149 existing double-wide classrooms will be relocated to over 50 schools. Reallocation of the mobile classrooms is determined by the Department and based on individual school’s enrolment statistics. This ensures that primary, high, combined, as well as farm schools will equally benefit from the Limpopo Province school expansion project.

The new units are a combination of classrooms, administration office blocks and ablution facilities, with the latter including separate boys’ and girls’ bathrooms and combined male/female ablutions for teachers. The classrooms consist of Kwikspace’s standard double-wide units, which measure 7m X 8m and each can cater for up to 42 children. The admin blocks are double-wide 18 metre-long units and all ablution facilities are single-wide units (3 m wide) that are 9 metres in length.

 “A feather in our cap is the local economic development component of this project,” says Kgakgamatso Phatlane, Kwikspace Government Sector Manager. “We briefly alleviated some economic strain in the local community by providing temporary employment for eight people per site for the first 36 classrooms. These were installed at 12 schools, which translates to 96 community members employed on short-term contracts. 

Phatlane points out that, as a result of the type of work required, the contracted labourers received skills development training in the areas of basic electrical reticulation, fencing and minor civil works.

 “We have a specified roll-out plan for the new units and are guided by the Department as far as the when and where of the classroom relocations are concerned,” he concludes. “Wherever we are able to do so, we will employ locally to aid with the labour and simultaneously upskill them within the tasks they are employed to complete.”