The Kosovo government, through the Ministry of Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (MESTI), committed to implementing rapid measures for scaling-up access to preschool infrastructure, and ensuring more equitable access to quality preschool programmes. UNICEF Kosovo worked closely with MESTI to develop a methodology to inform the expansion of preschool infrastructure. During 2022, Cornerstone Economic Research supported UNICEF and MESTI in developing an MS Excel model to support the methodology. As the project was being finalised, UNICEF identified off-site construction as a potential option for enabling rapid expansion of preschool infrastructure and requested that Cornerstone assist with a feasibility analysis of this option.
Some key insights from the analysis include:
- Off-site construction offers an opportunity to rapidly scale-up access to early childhood education infrastructure without compromising on the quality of learning environments in kindergartens.
- To achieve this, the government needs to organise its planning and procurement so that off-site manufacturers could design kindergartens that optimise their manufacturing and assembly processes while also meeting government’s technical specifications.
- Off-site construction is not about selecting containers and modules that fit together like Lego pieces. The benefit of off-site construction is the off-site aspect – the majority of construction takes place in a controlled environment, so is not subject to delays typical of on-site construction, such as weather, supply chain and coordination challenges.
- By placing monetary values on the resulting time savings, it was possible to show the conditions under which off-site construction is more cost effective than on-site construction.