At last – construction of the Malawi Dental School building takes off!

In a previous blog post, we reported on the handover of the identified site from Kamuzu University of Health Sciences to Mango Tree Construction Company, the contractor whose tender had been accepted for construction of the new dental school building on the Blantyre campus. We concluded that post with a photo of the white line that had been sprayed on the ground to delineate the perimeter of the site – great excitement that construction was due to start!

This post will be a largely pictorial summary of the work completed since that site handover on 11th April.

Very rapidly after the site handover, the contractor mobilised on site. A perimeter fence was erected …

… the footprint of the building was cleared of trees and other obstructions …

… a hoarding announcing the project was erected …

… and foundations were dug for construction of site offices …

… which rose from the ground rapidly:

The office in the Library Building on the KUHeS Blantyre Campus that I share with Peter Chimimba has a bird’s eye view of the building site, and it has became the norm every morning on arrival to take an immediate look out of the window to view the action! There was a period of significant earth moving …

… and on a visit to the site, Peter and I were astonished at the groundworks that had been completed:

On a slightly later visit, when much of the earth moving had been completed, we witnessed the key outlines of the building being carefully mapped out and marked:

A view across the site showed how the building has been designed into the natural slope of the ground:

Following the mapping of the building shown above, construction began in earnest:

Our most recent visit to the site was on Monday 4th August, when the following video was filmed:

The rate of progress of the construction is astonishing. For The MalDent Project team this is a dream come true and we look forward to keeping our followers updated as the building rises from its foundations.