A tender supplying twelve schools across two regions is not one delivery. It is twelve handovers on twelve dates, each with its own access road, store room and receiving officer. The delivery and installation plan decides whether a contract closes on time more often than unit price does. Phasing, site readiness, crew sizing and stock protection decide the outcome.
Why the installation plan decides whether the tender is accepted
Public buyers rarely pay against a bill of lading. They pay against an acceptance certificate signed at each school, and most contracts carry liquidated damages for late completion measured in CFA francs per day. A supplier who lands 900 desk-and-chair sets in Abidjan on time but cannot install them before the rentrée has still failed the contract. Goods sitting in a school corridor are unpaid goods, and they are exposed to theft, damp and damage that no marine insurance covers. On a large award those deductions can exceed the margin on the furniture itself, and they are taken from the final payment rather than invoiced separately. UNICEF Supply Division, World Bank-financed projects and UNDP tenders all require a completion certificate per site before the final tranche is released. Write the phasing, crew size and handover format into the bid document itself, so the evaluation committee can score them against a costed schedule rather than a promise.
How to phase deliveries across a multi-site rollout
Never ship a multi-site order as a single consignment. Schools have no secure storage for a full container, and a 40HQ of knock-down sets needs roughly 65 cubic metres of dry, lockable floor space that most head teachers do not have. Split the order into waves that follow the port of entry. Abidjan and San-Pédro are the Ivorian gateways, and a pilot 40HQ for three Abidjan schools proves carton count, crew productivity and paperwork before the rest of the budget is committed. Bouaké and Yamoussoukro follow once the pilot is signed off. The same sequence runs through Dakar and Thiès in Senegal, and through Douala for Yaoundé and Bafoussam in Cameroon. Confirm the arithmetic with our guide to calculating container loading for student desks and chairs so each wave matches a full box.
| Wave | Sites in scope | Volume | Target window |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Three Abidjan schools | 1 × 40HQ | 6 to 8 weeks after purchase order |
| 2 | Bouaké and Yamoussoukro | 2 × 40HQ | 4 weeks after wave 1 sign-off |
| 3 | San-Pédro and rural feeders | 1 to 2 × 40HQ | 6 weeks before the school year opens |
What must be true on site before the first truck arrives
Site readiness is the cheapest part of the project and the most frequently skipped. Before a truck leaves the port, each school needs a store room that locks, a floor at ground level with a dry screed, a door wider than the largest carton, and a named receiving officer. The room needs 100 mm timber battens so cartons never sit on concrete, plus ventilation, because a sealed room in Abidjan saturates within days. Confirm offloading in writing: a tail-lift truck cannot reach a classroom block at the end of a laterite track, and eight labourers per truck is the realistic minimum for a 40-footer. Customs clearance, duty and the gate pass must be settled before dispatch, since a vehicle held overnight outside a school gate is both a theft risk and an unbudgeted cost line. Our inspection FAQ before shipment lists the documents the receiving officer should already hold.
Assembly labour, tooling and realistic time per unit
Crew sizing is arithmetic, not guesswork. Time each product on a sample before the tender is priced, then multiply by the quantity per site. A knock-down single desk and chair takes twelve to fifteen minutes; a height-adjustable desk takes longer because the mechanism must be set at each band; a floor-fixed auditorium chair takes twenty to thirty minutes including drilling and levelling.
| Product | Assembler minutes per unit | Units per two-person crew per day |
|---|---|---|
| Knock-down single desk and chair | 12 to 15 | 60 to 75 |
| Height-adjustable student desk | 15 to 18 | 50 to 60 |
| Floor-fixed auditorium chair | 20 to 30 | 30 to 45 |
A 900-set order at fourteen minutes is 12,600 assembler-minutes, about 26 crew-days, so two crews over two weeks is realistic. Specify the tool kit in the quotation: cordless drivers with spare batteries, a rubber mallet, a spirit level, a matched hex key set, and spare bolts at two percent of the fixing count. Check the single student desk and chair and height-adjustable student desk against that timing, and plan auditorium seating as a separate package.
Protecting stock on site: humidity, harmattan dust and termites
The sea voyage is only half the exposure. Cartons that survive five weeks in a container can still fail in a school store room, because the failure mode changes from condensation to absorbed ground moisture and insect attack. Along the Gulf of Guinea coast, relative humidity in Abidjan and Douala stays above 80 percent for much of the year, and a carton opened after three weeks in a closed room shows mould bloom on the desktop edge first. Open every carton within 48 hours, inspect, and re-stack on battens with 50 mm air gaps at the wall. Inland, harmattan dust between December and February carries grit into exposed mechanisms, so wipe height-adjustment spindles before assembly. Termites are the third and slowest risk: never stack timber on bare earth or against a wall, treat battens before use, and insist on kiln-dried timber at 8 to 12 percent moisture content so frames stay stable through the first rainy season.
Handover, snag lists and the policy calendar that funds the order
Acceptance is a document set, not a handshake. For each school, produce a snag list recording every damaged or missing item by carton number and photograph, a signed acceptance certificate, and a two percent spare parts schedule. Keep one copy at the school and one in the payment file: the completion certificate unlocks the final tranche on World Bank, UNICEF and UNDP contracts. Then align it with the policy calendar. In Côte d’Ivoire, the 2015 compulsory-schooling law made education mandatory from 6 to 16, and the 2026–2027 year opened on 14 September 2026, so furniture must be installed in the dry weeks before that date. Senegal’s PAQUET-EF 2018–2030 ties procurement to enrolment targets in Dakar and Thiès, while Cameroon’s SND30 and its 2023–2030 education strategy frame Douala and Yaoundé. The scale behind these budgets: UNICEF estimates that 70 percent of ten-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read a simple text, and UNESCO counts 273 million children and youth out of school. Send your site list and completion date to our Africa B2B quote desk for a costed phasing plan.
