Malawi’s ambition is for every child to have a primary school education. To achieve it they need school buildings that are low-cost yet comfortable learning environments, and can be accomplished with the nation’s limited access to sophisticated building materials and techniques. With architects John McAslan & Partners, Arup designed a working prototype that could help meet the need for 17,000 new schools in Malawi.

Arup built four prototype schools with local construction techniques and materials, such as timber and stabilised soil blocks. The schools run without electricity – they harness natural daylight and ventilation to stay more comfortable than existing school buildings and reduce solar glare. Flexible rooms and an outdoor social area help make the schools successful for learning, and a community focal point.  

Arup combined our expertise in engineering and international development with the communities’ local knowledge and needs to build successful prototypes that are most useful and doable, locally. Towards this, we engaged the community in dialogue for each project, using international expertise to make a truly local project.

Sustainable building design

Arup delivered a sustainable, performance-based that was lean, robust, cheap and easy to build.

The schools were built mainly with local construction techniques and materials, such as timber and stabilised soil blocks. They are also designed to run without electricity. They harness natural daylight and ventilation to create a comfortable learning environment, which is typically three degrees cooler than existing school buildings.

The flexible classroom blocks include three interconnected indoor spaces as well as two generous covered terraces. The outdoor areas create a sense of connection between the schools and the families they serve. This helps to encourage parents to send their children to school and establishes the new buildings as focal points of the community.

Design drawing of the school
We designed four prototype schools that are low-cost, sustainable and can be built with locally available expertise and materials

Lighting design and analysis

Existing schools in Malawi struggle to provide good natural lighting. To avoid solar glare, they have small windows. But this restricts the amount of daylight that can get into the building — something that’s crucial in areas where electricity is not always available.

There are no design standards or benchmarks for the environmental performance of school buildings in Malawi. So Arup used local thermal and solar data to set what we thought was the right performance standard for the school. We then designed a simple ridge ventilation element to provide both daylight and ventilation.

As well as detailed thermal modelling, the combined skylight and ventilator required a degree of lighting analysis that is normally applied to museums and galleries.

Shading for the school comes from vertical baffles in the skylight and simple timber shutters on the windows. As a result of all these measures, the buildings enjoy double the natural daylight levels of the standard school design. But they keep internal temperatures comfortable and minimise glare.

Daylight levels in the new school are useful and comfortable for longer each day. This means there’s enough light for it to serve as a community building when classes are not in session — making the building even more valuable for local people.