9,296 classrooms already built under PPP scheme – DepED

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Education (DepEd) announced on Wednesday the completion of its first private-public partnership (PPP) project on school classrooms, worth more than P16 billion.

The 9,296 classrooms built under the first phase of the PPP for School Infrastructure Project (PSIP) will be used by more than 400,000 students in the Ilocos, Central Luzon and Calabarzon regions, which would help ease out the country’s perennial problem on classroom backlog.

Completed last Dec. 4, the DepEd’s first PPP project totaled P16.28 billion and is under a 10-year build-lease-and-transfer contract with Bright Future Educational Facilities Inc. and Citicore Holdings Investment Inc.-Megawide Construction Corp., with which the government signed a concession agreement in October 2012.

In a project brief, the PPP Center said that through the DepEd’s PSIP, the government has sought “to expand the supply of classrooms in all public school system as fast as it could reasonably be done [to] cut the current shortage of around 66,800 classroom units nationwide.” It added that the project covered the design, financing, construction and furnishing of either one-story or two-story classrooms in the beneficiary regions.

Meanwhile, the DepEd said that as of Oct. 31, 2015, more than 1,690 classrooms have been built under the second phase of the PSIP, with a project cost of P3.86 billion. Under this project, around 4,370 one-story, two-story, three-story and four-story classrooms will be built in Ilocos, Cagayan Valley, Central Luzon, Northern Mindanao, Caraga and the Cordillera Administrative Region, according to the PPP Center.  SFM