Renovations have finally begun at Kwanda's newest clinic in Onosa, Lagos, Nigeria! The community has also given the clinic its name: TOP Community Health Centre, or TOP clinic for short. They chose it carefully, and it stands for both the name of our community partner and the clinic's ambition to be the top destination for accessible healthcare in Onosa. We absolutely love it.
This month we inspected the donated site, which used to be a restroom, with our local engineer and mapped out the clinic with our architects. The plan has a reception and waiting area, a nursing station, a consulting room, an observation ward with its own restroom, a pharmacy and a general restroom, all sized to approved government standards. We then removed the old toilets and sinks to get the space ready for renovation.
Quotes for the first block work came in three to five times above our planned budget, because of inflation in Nigeria and variation between communities. We took extra time to understand what was driving the prices, widened our search and reviewed quotes from the artisans who helped build Safe City. They won the bid, which kept us closest to our budget, and in September our local construction workers broke ground and laid the blocks.
We have spent around $1,500 (about £1,180) on blocks and materials, paying the construction workers and removing the old plumbing. We will keep you posted on whether prices keep rising as the renovation moves along.