Distributed Manufacturing: Building Resilience through Local Manufacturers in a Post-COVID South Asia
Crossposted from Frontier Technologies. Written by Kuldeep Aryal and Chathuri Weerasinghe.
When the pandemic choked global supply chains in 2020, small distributed manufacturers and fabrication labs across Bangladesh stepped up to meet the skyrocketing demand for emergency personal protective equipment (PPE).
This article will take you through the journey BRAC Social Innovation Lab went on to find resilient infrastructure closer to home. BRAC is now working with local makerspaces and FabLabs to:
Create a network of local manufacturers in Bangladesh, that can facilitate a convenient needs assessment process for BRAC programmes based on ground demands.
Provide BRAC programmes a platform to explore new products
Test the efficiency of the distributed manufacturing on a system-level within BRAC, so as to ensure that the innovation is feasible to be adopted on a larger institutional scale through regular channels.
Many thanks to Frontier Technologies Livestreaming (FTL) for their support.