The university will be built in seven years at a cost of US $ 160 million and when completed the campus will have nearly 1.6 million square feet of built space accommodating around 3,000 students and nearly 300 faculty members and administrators, said the officials and representatives of the AUW yesterday afternoon at a briefing session of the master plan at Chittagong Circuit House.

The AUW Support Foundation organised the briefing session.

The speakers said the AUW is being established as an independent, international and secular institution of higher studies for women of South and South East Asia and the Middle East under a special charter granted by the Parliament of Bangladesh, and as per the charter at least 25 per cent of the students will be drawn from Bangladesh.

Terming AUW a distinctive and high quality university, they said the AUW will emerge as a "Centre of Excellence" in the region.

"The AUW will provide extensive academic facilities for the undergraduate programme, pre-undergraduate preparatory programme and for a series of graduate schools in fields such as engineering, management and computer science, and all the students, faculty members and administrators are expected to live on campus," said architect Christopher Mulvey, of Moshe Safde and Associates of Boston, USA, which developed and designed the AUW Master Plan.

Mulvey said the future campus of the AUW can be likened to a microcosm of a village or a small town and given its relative isolation from the dense urban fabric of Chittagong, it must possess a certain element of self-sufficiency.

"The design emerged out of considerations of the unique shape of the site, its particular climate, the cultural heritage of the region and the available resources and technology for construction," he said adding "the unusual site is formed by a series of valleys and ridges with a fragile flora susceptible to damage by erosion."

Highlighting key aspects of the master plan, Mulvey further said the residential facilities follow the natural contour lines atop the ridges, reinforcing the natural topography and creating an edge to the campus.

The organisers said major donators to date to the AUW include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (US$ 15 million), Goldman Sachs Foundation (US$ 1.4 million), Open Society Institute (US$ 1.05 million) and USAID (US$ 1 million).

Design Co-Ordinator architect Zarina Hossain, Iqbal Habib and Saiful Hoque of Vipti Sthapati Brindo, Dr Jamal Nazrul Islam and lawyer Rana Das Gupta were present at the briefing.