Cost modelling for standardised design projects

In 1992, the Egyptian government launched the national project for building 1500 schools every year. Over the period 1993-2005 more than 15000 schools have been built and still there is an on going demand due to the demographic factors besides the political inclination to erode illiteracy as a proactive national security measure. The share of school buildings in the national budget is increasing. Over the last three fiveyear plans, the total expenditure on school projects exceeded 13bn Egyptian Pounds. This paper aims at develop a price-forecasting model for school buildings in Egypt in an attempt to optimise the deployment of the scarce resources of the developing country. The model developed based on data collected in Egypt for actual prices of 120 schools built over the period 1994-2005 to predict the cost of school projects in the initial stage using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression. The study benefits of the unique attribute of this national project that implements standardized design hence reducing the number of product variables and providing further in-depth analysis of the effect of other variables. The developed model besides being simple and may be easily comprehended by practitioners in Egypt, when tested, reflected high accuracy.