Awareness of the
Nubian Vault concept

Awareness of the
Nubian Vault concept

Kickstarting activities are at the heart of AVN’s programme and are carried out by local AVN teams and the partners they work with.

Together they carry out awareness-raising activities vis-à-vis three target groups: rural populations (the programme’s core target), urban populations and institutional actors and those involved in development. From this awareness-raising work and advocacy a demand for construction projects has emerged that AVN supports, by placing clients and artisan-masons in touch and by monitoring and inspecting worksites. .

Spreading through rural zones and private market growth

Since 2000, AVN has redoubled its propagation centres (regions and pilot villages), aiming at continual and widespread expansion of NV market kickstarting.

• 15 regional branches are spread over five countries;
• There are 152 active pilot village

Awareness-raising activities are carried out with key people, AVN’s local intermediaries, who are convinced by the NV technique and who are persuasive at local level, working with village authorities.

Activities to promote kickstarting

With an average annual growth of more than 26% in the number of projects begun over the past ten years, the NV concept and the kickstart method it relies upon have more than proven their worth.

AVN wants to accelerate that growth and strengthen the kickstart method by combining several aspects of it. The incentives for training and construction intended to stimulate client decisions to build and those of potential apprentices (among the core target beneficiaries) to receive training.

• Testimony of Samuel Inoussa

Kickstarting the public and community market in order to institutionalise the NV sector

AVN is working toward a public and/or community NV market by raising awareness with local and regional clients (regional councils, mayors’ offices, NGOs, etc.) and by supporting their NV construction projects. The objective is for them to adopt, depending on their preexisting needs, new construction practices that are well-adapted to the socio-economic and environmental context and that respond to issues of comfort and durability, and that therefore directly benefit the target populations.

This objective is part of a broader strategy aimed at proactively involving African institutional actors in managing the Nubian Vault programme and more broadly in the issue of adapted housing for as many as possible, for which they are responsible.

This partner involvement is essential to a more widespread deployment

It became clear that the Nubian Vault programme could not take place without the involvement of civil society organisations and actors of local development, both in terms of legitimacy (those groups being the direct representatives of beneficiaries) and in terms of the leverage effects that these actors create.

Their local deployment and network, their capacity to raise awareness and mobilise their members, their possible need for community buildings and their good example of training all mean that these partners complement AVN’s methodology of promoting the NV concept.

The goal is therefore to build a good partnership with them and to allow for the necessary time to select, train and support these partners depending on the positions, specific characteristics and capacities of each of them.

• See AVN Partners