Dominica: Seven schools and hundreds of homes to be built by Digicel

Last updated: November 15, 2017 at 14:55 pm

The CEO of Digicel Dominica has announced the company’s commitment to building seven schools and 360 homes in the north east of Dominica.

The primary schools will be in the villages of Castle Bruce, La Plaine and the Kalinago Territory.

Working in partnership with IsraAid, Nikima Royer-Jno Baptiste said: “We will also be rebuilding the homes of a number of children attending these seven schools.”

“It’s important for us to focus on the most vulnerable at this time to make sure we get them back to being in a better place.”

“[We] hope that with a stable home environment and appropriate educational facilities this will be a positive initiative for the children to be able to really settle down after the trauma of Hurricane Maria.”

The company intends on building schools of the highest possible standard, she added.

“One of the things we’ve observed is that architectural design is the same for all the schools. However, you can see that some people did some things differently for some of the schools, that’s why some had different structural damages than others. So, we want to ensure that they all meet the same standard.”

Digicel has partnered with a certified structural engineer with experience with rebuilding infrastructure after tsunamis and earthquakes, and requests for proposals (RFP) have been distributed to several local and regional contractors. This sets the tentative start time of construction to mid- December.

“We’ve purchased material locally and that’s being mobilized we’re hoping to get it up to the territory sometime within the next week or so and we hope to start working on some homes really, really soon.”

Reconnection continues

The company has had to deal with numerous thefts and issues relating to vandalism of cell sites throughout the island.

“With communication so essential to the country’s recovery and rebuilding effort, we condemn this activity in the strongest strength of the words and we do intend in seeking all possible means to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

Despite these and other challenges, 80% of customers have been reconnected to the network with a total of 34 cell sites are now providing island-wide coverage including the areas of Grand Savanne, New Florida Estate, ScottsHead, Woodfordhill, Jimmit and Sultan.

Notably, Digicel is “the only service provider to have provided connectivity to the La Plaine, Grandbay and Delices areas.”

“We have also provided connectivity to 30 ICT business customers. In an effort to get service to decentralised customers, those located outside of Roseau, we’re also deploying an air fibre solution and that should be available in very short order. Later on this week we should be connecting our first customers.”

Recovery work in Roseau is complete, and “we are registering just under 200 residential customers that are now connected to our high-speed internet and our digital TV.”