La Voûte Nubienne

Awareness of the Nubian Vault concept

Chloé Adloff — 2018-05-07T06:41:11Z

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

Rural awareness raising campaign in Burkina Faso

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

National and International Advocacy

Chloé Adloff — 2018-05-07T06:15:50Z

Strengthened by international recognition for its field work for sustainable housing in Africa, AVN has engaged into national and international advocacy, hoping to generate a better inclusion of this key issue in development initiatives and related funding mechanisms.

National Advocacy

Responsibility for matters of housing belong to the actors of the building and housing sector, governmental as well as private (ministries, public agencies, local authorities, international donors, etc.). Issues of housing can bear weight on policies and practices in a large number of fields: economy, law, vocational training, employment, environment and climate change adaptation.

AVN's ambition if for the relevant institutions to take ownership of its sustainable housing programme, enabling the association to:

Act as operator for the implementation of local development plans;
Contribute to the emergence of a formal market supported by public and service building needs, and therefore participate in embedding the NV into building practices.

AVN therefore encourages political actors to support the NV market and integrate this solution into national and regional development strategies as well as into country-wide building programmes.

International Advocacy

AVN leads an international advocacy initiative on sustainable housing for the greater numbers and the transformation of building practices in Africa.

AVN's presence on global-scale events (Climate Conference of Parties, Desertification Conference of Parties, Climate Chance, World Urban Forum, etc.) strengthens its public profile on the international stage and enables it to introduce its multidimensional programme integrating issues of access to housing, economic development, professional training, micro-entrepreneurship, climate change mitigation and adaptation and improvement of living standards, working conditions and provision of basic services.

Manifesto for an Appropriate Housing in Sahelian Africa

AVN presented during COP21 in Paris its Manifesto for an Appropriate Housing in Sahelian Africa.

Among the signatories:

Yann Arthus-Bertrand, photographer / President of the GoodPlanet Foundation
Abdouldaye Baldé, Minister of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Senegal
Monique Barbut, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
Pierre Bédier, President of the French Département of the Yvelines
Pascal Canfin, Director General of WWF France / ex-Minister delegate of Development
Jean-Louis Destans, former Consul of France in Senegal / former President of the Council of the French Département of the Eure
Pierre-Alexis Dumas, President of the Hermès Foundation
Haidar El Ali, former Minister of Ecology and Nature Protection, Senegal
Diéne Farba Sarr, Minister of Urban Renewal, Housing, and the Living Environment, Senegal
Noël Fonton, former Minister of Urbanism, Habitat, and Sanitation, Benin
Yvonnick Huet, Director General of Agrisud International
Nicolas Hulot, Minister of Ecological Transition and Solidarity, France
Joël Labbé, Senateur of Morbihan, France
Moussa Mara, former Prime Minister and Minister of Urbanism, Mali
Lamine Ouedraogo, Director General of the Green Economy and Climate Change Initiative, Burkina Faso
Gaëlle Raulic, General Secretary of the Habitat and Francophonie network
Michel Rocard, former Prime Minister of France
Gerard Sénac, President Director General of Eiffage Sénégal
Jean Marie Tétart, former Deputy, French Département of the Yvelines
Théophile Worou, former Minister of the Environment and Climate Change, Benin
Lionel Zinsou, former Prime Minister of Benin

Sign the Manifesto

Proposal for an Adapted Housing Plan in the Sahel (PBAAS)

In June 2017 AVN has proposed to the Sahel Alliance partners the integration of sustainable housing issues in the development projects it intends to carry out in the sub-continent.

The proposal is built from existing French and international commitments in matters of development, climate change and building and construction. Its ambition is for a long-term initiative to be created for the implementation of appropriate housing policies in Africa along with professional training programmes, especially geared towards rural youth.

Transferring ownership to local actors

Chloé Adloff — 2018-05-07T06:06:33Z

Because housing matters in global stakes, the involvement of a plurality of actors is essential to ensure a large-scale transformation of building practices in Africa. AVN collaborates with cooperation institutions, civil society organizations, ministries and local governance authorities for their ownership and replication of it NV dissemination methods.

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Training of the sector

Chloé Adloff — 2018-05-07T06:06:30Z

AVN strengthens the knowledge of all formal and informal actors of the building sector: apprentices, masons, artisans, businesses, project managers, building technicians, architects, etc. It offers technical and entrepreneurial training modules. AVN also supports these professionals through expertise, research and technical capitalization services.

Technical Training of Building Professionals

AVN's programme aims to transmit a building knowledge embedded into social habits (co-option-based horizontal transmission) and into a market reality. The basic Nubian Vault technical training therefore takes place “on the ground”, on real building sites.

This training is offered by trainer-masons, selected for the technical, teaching and human qualities. Specific modules, covering different technical aspects of building, are added within some constructions, on additional time devoted to training, taken out of profitability considerations usual to construction. Basic technical training is supplemented by theoretical learning modules, offered in AVN “academies”.

AVN reinforces these technical training activities through:

Creating a Training offer catalog, indexing all types of training offered;
Developing new teaching and monitoring tools: Livret du Parcours de l'Apprenant, guide de formation et d'évaluation à l'usage du maçon formateur et de l'apprenti;
Intensifying promotional offers that enable all target populations to have access to the training and that support collaboration among masons;
Developing “Nubian Vault” curricula within Vocational Training Centers (VTC).

Entrepreneurial Training

AVN develops entrepreneurial support systems aiming at boosting artisans' activity and their economic integration on the building markets, formal as well as informal.

This activity takes place in a complex context: entrepreneurial vision is difficult in West African rural cultures, needs for training are significant (number literacy, planning and organization, management, marketing, accounting and cash flow management, investment and amortization, etc.), and the trainees' profiles and projects vary. Additionnally, the reality and value of collaborative work must also be carefully considered within the entrepreneurial modes offered by AVN.

AVN's goal is to provide a relevant and empirical answer to the actual needs of Nubian Vault artisans and masons, as much as possible.

This activity marks a key milestone in building NV market density.
By strengthening the marketing of masons in their market development (including promoting the NV concept towards new and potential clients), AVN will be able to progressively curb its own sensitization actions on the demand side. As a result, the organizations will be able to devote more resources towards training.

Training for building sector technical actors

AVN is currently extending its training offers to other professionals in the building sector: project owners, project managers, architects, building technicians, etc., in order to stimulate NV building projects by contracting bodies and their monitoring.

The Technical Expertise Division produces reference materials on both techniques and methods, and implements information and awareness actions on public and service building constructions.

Consult all NV technical reference materials