FOR LESS than it would take to build a single classroom at a public school on the Monterey Peninsula, a Carmel-based nonprofit can construct an entire schoolhouse in Africa.

Civil engineer Jon Raggett is director of Schools3, which has raised money to build more than 30 schools since 1999. Most are in Mali, a Sahara Desert country with the worst literacy rate and the lowest school attendance in the world. Mali needs some 9,000 schools to serve its children, according to Raggett. The rest of his group’s projects are in Honduras, India and elsewhere in Africa.

“One school is under construction now, and four more are scheduled to begin building in January, so that will carry us through 37 schools,” said Raggett, who is in the middle of his annual quiet pitch for donations. “We are collecting funds for the 38th. It’s just going gangbusters.”

A soft-spoken man who holds multiple degrees in engineering from Princeton and Stanford, Raggett owns West Wind Laboratory, Inc., and specializes in the wind dynamics of bridges and buildings. He has conducted studies of projects throughout the United States, Central and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Pacific Rim, and has won several awards.

He became involved in school projects overseas after a Honduran priest spoke at All Saints Church about running an orphanage. Inspired, Raggett decided he “should be doing something,” and he founded Development Engineering Research Institute in 1994 “with the mission to use all relevant engineering and technical means to aid development and to reduce poverty in developing countries.”

Raggett helped engineer a school in Haiti affiliated with St. Dunstan’s Church in Carmel Valley. “I came back and said, ‘Our organization can do this,’ so we started in 1999 building schools,” he said.

Mali needs the most

With a per-capita annual income of about $360, Mali has few natural resources and needs help educating its children, according to Raggett.

“We’re not trying to force the schools on them. We’re trying to address the requested need from the Ministry of Education,” he said. The ministry decides where they should be built and provides the certified teachers to run them.

Each three-room schoolhouse, which also has a storage room and a bathroom, costs about $10,000 in materials and $7,000 in labor. The general design calls for a metal roof, concrete-block walls, and plaster inside and out. Before the dollar fell, the schools were even cheaper, totaling less than $8,000.

“That was when the Euro was 88 cents, and now it’s about $1.50,” he said. “But they’re still a good deal.”

Unskilled laborers help with construction, with between six and 20 people volunteering daily. They get the sand and gravel on site for free, and the community donates the land. Only the job superintendent, a steel worker, a brick maker and a plasterer receive pay, “so there’s tremendous volunteer involvement,” said Raggett, who visits the sites every few years and is planning to travel to Mali in the spring.

“I don’t go to the sites often because we have a partner group that oversees construction,” he explained. “They are Malian employees who actually hire the laborers and coordinate with the village.”

The small buildings serve as public primary schools in the daytime, adult schools at night, and community centers whenever possible. Another nonprofit group regularly checks in, to “ensure they continue to be used as schools and not a chicken coop, or something like that,” Raggett said.

Since undertaking the work in Mali, he has had the satisfaction of seeing statistics improve from a roughly 74 percent illiteracy rate.

“But still, the illiteracy rate is about 60 percent, and it’s not that good for women,” he said. “Only 25 to 30 percent of school-aged children are actually enrolled in school.”

To learn more about Schools3 and its projects in Mali, Honduras and India, or to make a donation, visit www.schools3.org, call (831) 883-1534 or email mail@schools3.org.