Building Makerspaces for the 4th Industrial Revolution
Paul Birkelo is the former Head of Operations at Gearbox Kenya and is now helping to launch the Gearbox International Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to supporting makerspaces in emerging markets.
Earlier this month, the World Economic Forum published a report titled The Future of Jobs and Skills in Africa: Preparing the Region for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
The list of the continent’s woes rattled off in the executive briefing may sound familiar: Africa has the youngest population in the world (60% are under 25); 15–20 million new youth are set to join the workforce every year for the next 30 years; despite being better educated than ever (52% are expected to have a secondary education by 2030), there is a huge mismatch between the skills employers are seeking and those possessed by young graduates.
In addition to these familiar (and daunting) challenges, the report focuses on a striking and relatively new concern — that many African economies are more exposed to disruption by new technologies than many realize.
Concern about Africans’ uptake of technology is certainly not new, but the report hits on two aspects that are noteworthy: 1) the sheer scale of the demographic challenge — half a billion new 18 year-olds looking for work by 2050, and 2) the nature of the work they’re likely to find. Last century’s transformations across Southeast Asia had a similar theme as the first industrial revolution in Europe in the 1800s, shifting large numbers of agricultural workers towards wage labor in factories. The future of Africa’s industrialization is unlikely to follow the same path.
Demand for the kind of low-skilled, labor intensive manufacturing that reshaped much of Asia is not set to grow at the same pace as the world’s workforce. New manufacturing technologies created an explosion in global productivity per worker over the last fifty years, with the result that fewer people are needed to make things than ever before.
The promise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is not going to be more manufacturing jobs like the factory lines of decades past. The rapidly decreasing cost, ever increasing ease of use, and widespread availability of fabrication technologies like CNC machines and 3D printers are transforming the way the world designs and makes things. In the most optimistic point of view, using these tools just about anyone, just about anywhere, can learn enough (thanks to the internet) to make just about anything.
How easy that is to do in practice is debatable, and it does not mean that what they make is necessarily going to translate into economic impact. New business models that take advantage of these trends are only just beginning to be developed, and how they will play out is far from certain (see Exploring the Maker-Industrial Revolution: Will the Future of Production be Local? by Anna Waldman-Brown). But at least in Kenya, a dramatic shift in who is able to design and make commercial products is causing a corresponding shift in whom these products are designed for. Young Kenyan entrepreneurs are focused as much on designing novel products tailored to local needs as on selling imports or exporting to larger markets.
Gearbox — From “Shop in a Box” to Industrial-Scale Makerspace
In this latest industrial revolution, the work of making things is less about rote manual labor, and value is created by designing new things that can be tailor-made for the people who use them. In the world of work soon to be populated by 500 million new young Africans, the makers of things best placed to benefit are likely to be those who can build a business model around the distributed manufacture, rapid iteration, and localized appeal of their designs. In other words, new African jobs will come from Africans designing and making products in Africa, for sale to other Africans.
This is radically different from the export-led growth model that powered Asia’s boom, and supporting it requires a radically different approach.
One model for doing so is a makerspace. In 2009, the University of Nairobi Fab Lab became one of the first places in Kenya where anyone could go to learn about and use the latest in fabrication technology, from 3D printers to laser cutters and CNC machines. In 2010, the iHub was founded as a gathering space for Nairobi’s tech community, bringing together designers, coders, entrepreneurs, makers, hackers, and global investors. In 2013, the iHub was given a shipping container full of tools (a “shop in a box” including welders and a CNC plasma cutter), and working with the Nairobi Fab Lab and several local companies, launched Kenya’s first makerspace — Gearbox.
From day one, Gearbox has aimed to be Kenya’s “open space for design and rapid prototyping.” Having started from a shipping container, in 2015 it grew into a dedicated 2,500 square-foot space called Gearbox Lite (see featured image). Now, Gearbox is kicking off a new chapter as a 20,000 square-foot makerspace in the heart of Nairobi’s Industrial Area. When fully built out (renovations started in March), Gearbox Industrial will host 9,000 square feet of private office spaces, 6,000 square feet of shared coworking, design lab, classroom, and event spaces, and 5,000 square feet of shared workshops featuring industrial grade equipment for working with wood, metal, plastics, electronics, and digital fabrication.
Why a Makerspace?
The term “makerspace” captures the core of what Gearbox is — a space for people who design and make things — but it is not a term that sits easily even within Gearbox’s own community. To many of the designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who have passed through Gearbox Lite over the last two years, the term “maker” implies a hobbyist or tinkerer, and generally holds a connotation of unprofessionalism.
Outside of Kenya, the word “makerspace” often gets conflated with related terms like “Fab Lab” or “hackerspace.” For the uninitiated, Gui Cavalcanti wrote a helpful description of the differences between these kinds of spaces in Make Magazine, although his definitions are still far from universally applied. In the US, places called makerspaces are popping up in schools, libraries, youth centers, and corporate headquarters, and can range from a small room in an elementary school with a 3D printer and papercraft tools, to a space like First Build in Louisville, Kentucky, with 35,000 sq. ft. of advanced prototyping and low-volume manufacturing space.
What most of these spaces have in common is that they are open to the public, and they provide tools for making physical things. By being open to the general public, Gearbox has seen people with a tremendous variety of backgrounds pass through its doors. Students and lecturers have collaborated on business models growing out of shared research; local business owners have come to seek out talented designers and engineers; Kenyans from “up country” have traveled hours to use the machines to make tools or parts they can’t find elsewhere. By providing access to tools, space, and skills that are hard to find in Kenya, Gearbox has seen projects that range from medical equipment (Sato’s foetal heart rate monitor), to novel water treatment systems (Usafi Comfort), to tools for preventing human/wildlife conflict (#Innovate4Wildlife), to agricultural technology (a low-cost chicken brooder that alerts farmers to problems via their mobile phones).
Makerspaces for Hardware Entrepreneurs
This variety sheds light on the real power of a makerspace — it does not tell you what to build, or even necessarily how to build it. It asks its members what they would build for themselves. This does not guarantee that everything made within its walls will be “high-impact” — tinkering is an essential part of learning to use new tools. Gearbox has seen plenty of 3D printed toys, surfboards, and other fun projects made in its workshop. Many of these items are being built by the same people who are also working on making cooking fuel affordable to people living on less than $2 dollars a day (PayGo Energy), or sanitary towel dispensers for women and girls living in slum communities (Esvendo). The fact that the community Gearbox serves are making these things themselves is what gives meaning to the phrase “local solutions for local problems.”
Turning the things they make into economic impact requires a specific kind of makerspace, however. While it is open to everyone regardless of what they are making, Gearbox is designed to serve the needs of hardware entrepreneurs — those launching a business around designing and making physical, manufacturable products. Broadly speaking, we’ve found three things that make a makerspace useful to hardware entrepreneurs in Kenya: space, tools, and people.
Space
The space needs to be physically large enough to build large projects (like a farm-scale biogas digester), host a small team, handle inventory, or set up low-volume assembly lines. It needs to be polished enough to host meetings and welcome clients, and should have amenities like conference rooms and breakout spaces. At 100 square feet per member, 20,000 square feet is a rough lower boundary for a space with 200 active members — enough to begin to build a viable sustainability model for the space itself.
Tools
The equipment needs to be of professional quality. While consumer-grade laser cutters, 3D printers, and desktop CNC machines are getting better every year, few can stand up to 12 hours of daily use by members of varied skill levels. A makerspace’s equipment gets beat up fast, and the tools need to be able to handle abuse, especially when replacement parts can take weeks or months to arrive from overseas.
People
Keeping all of that equipment in working order requires a full-time professional staff. The difference between a well-tuned band saw and one with a wobbly blade can be the difference between a prototype that’s polished enough to show to an investor, or hours of struggle to make anything that doesn’t look like an amateur affair. Gearbox’s staff don’t just keep the machines working — they teach members why and where details and precision matter; they design and build prototypes for contracting clients; and they make sure that Gearbox is always a friendly and welcoming space to everyone, no matter their background. They are at the heart of everything Gearbox does, and the main reason members and clients come back.
These three things — a physically large space, high quality equipment, and a full-time professional staff — are the key components of a makerspace for hardware entrepreneurs, and assembling them in a place like Kenya is not easy. Tools and equipment are hard to find and expensive to import, infrastructure like electricity or internet are unreliable, regulatory processes like starting a company or nonprofit are lengthy and opaque, and engineering talent can be hard to find and harder to keep when competing with industry. A fully equipped, 20,000 square-foot or larger space will cost $3 to $5 million dollars to build. Anything less is likely to fall short of the goal of helping entrepreneurs take their ideas from prototype to market at any significant scale.
The Gearbox International Foundation
Over the past several years, we’ve been fortunate to enjoy a tremendous amount of support, both from within Kenya and internationally. We could not have gotten where we are without a lot of help, and we still have a long way to go to see Nairobi’s hardware entrepreneurs realize their full potential. Moving to a larger facility is an essential step on that path, as is continuing to build the capacity of our team and local ecosystem. We also know that others are working to achieve the same goals across Africa and elsewhere, and have faced many of the same challenges.
That is why we are setting up the Gearbox International Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting everyone using makerspaces as a vehicle to accelerate hardware entrepreneurship in emerging markets.
At a time when more and more organizations, governments, and companies around the world are seeing the potential of the Maker Movement, hardware entrepreneurs in wealthy countries have access to more resources than ever. The number of large-scale, professionally equipped makerspaces in the US and Europe is growing, venture capitalists poured $1.7 billion into hardware startups in the US in the first half of 2016 alone (see this article by Chris Quintero at BOLT), and organizations like the Nation of Makers and the Fab Foundation are doing extraordinary work in maker education and community building.
The hardware entrepreneurs of Kenya — and any place where quality tools and materials are hard to come by, where poor infrastructure makes it difficult to start or grow a business, where skilled engineering talent is scarce — deserve the same level of support. The need has never been more urgent. By 2050, Africa alone will need to create 500M jobs just to keep pace with population growth. Most of these jobs won’t come in the form of traditional manufacturing. By investing in makerspaces for hardware entrepreneurs, we can bring the same tools that are driving innovation in Boston, San Francisco, London, or Shenzhen to Nairobi, Accra, Cairo, and Lagos.
By starting the Gearbox International Foundation, we aim to make that path easier both for makerspace owners and managers, and for the businesses, donors, and investors that would like to lead, rather than follow, the next industrial revolution.
If you run a makerspace in an emerging market country, or you would like to know how you can support the world’s hardware entrepreneurs and the spaces that serve them, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
