6 routes to building resilient local production systems via distributed manufacturing and circular economy approaches
The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath has demonstrated the limitations of a reliance on global production systems and long-distance supply chains that shift production control away from communities impacted by disasters. Moreover, the pandemic highlighted the need for a long-term strategy for resilience, so that communities are able to handle a wide range of future shocks and challenges.
This blog shares key lessons learned from COVIDaction Local Production Local Solutions (LPLS), a UK FCDO funded programme that supported a portfolio of innovators to use distributed manufacturing and circular economy approaches to address demand for PPE, medical supplies, and other unavailable goods. Through this, LPLS identified that localisation of production, distributed manufacturing, and circular economy approaches can help increase resilience to emergencies and improve the responsiveness of production systems to community needs. These approaches can also help to reduce waste, limit carbon emissions, and mitigate the impact of production systems on the environment.
Working with innovators and partners, COVIDaction Local Production Local Solutions (LPLS) identified six interrelated pillars to enabling resilient production systems which meet the needs of local communities, help them thrive and respond quickly to systemic shocks.
1. Flexibility
Flexible technologies, practices and process allow companies to adapt their range of products in response to market demands, without making extensive changes to their operations of infrastructure. As we saw early during the pandemic, hyper efficient but rigid modern supply chains are unable to respond to rapidly changing needs of communities globally. The LPLS portfolio showcased two types of innovative flexibility where businesses in LMICs were able to pivot and respond to COVID-19:
Intrinsic flexibility: Increasing internal flexibility of production without input from outside the company e.g., using digital fabrication equipment to produce items at a lower cost, helps democratise and localise innovation and subsequent production globally.
Extrinsic flexibility: Activities occurring outside the business which increase its flexibility e.g., via mutually beneficial collaboration between businesses that allow for new products to be produced with minor changes to each business’ practice.
2. Collaboration
Collaboration among different producers and with consumers within an ecosystem can create flexibility, as well as increase the overall potential outputs of the system. There are a range of ways that collaboration within supply chains and production ecosystems can be better supported. Two key approaches tested by LPLS were:
Local collaborative manufacturing: This can include directly facilitating collaboration between different local producers, such that the strengths of the parties can be retained, while offsetting their individual weaknesses. This can also involve supporting online and offline collective manufacturing platforms, which help give different producers and consumers visibility of each other’s needs and capacities, serving as a basis for connections and partnerships.
Peer-to-peer learning communities: As learnings from LPLS’ own online peer-learning community for innovators show, developing such a network enables rapid identification and replication of beneficial practices.
3. Local Materials
If materials are sourced and processed locally, then supply chains are less reliant on distant economics and more revenue can circulate and benefit the local community. This prevents value concentration overseas and reliance on imports, for which dependent, lower-income regions often pay a heavy price as evidenced by the breakdown of global logistics during the pandemic. LPLS grantees showcased two ways to enable identification and utilisation of local materials:
Biomaterials: These are sustainable, renewable materials which biodegrade safely within the natural environment and provide alternatives to conventional and petroleum-based materials that presently dominate global production.
Material recovery and reutilisation: Local economies also benefit from better identifying and materials already found within supply chains. Once materials have entered the local arena, their use should be maximised as much as possible.
4. Human Potential
Nurturing human skills, potential and agency are key to a self-sustainable and resilient community. The information sector and ‘gig economy’ is a highly under potentiated sector that could be better incorporated into wider industry. LPLS found a number of key ways to better facilitate and tap into human potential for resilience, including from a donor perspective, providing direct offline engagement for funding calls. Here, as part of its attempt to find innovations responding to the pandemic, LPLS focused on engaging with offline communities in 7 countries across Africa, through using local scouts, to visit hard-to-reach communities, and seek out grass root innovators, who could not be reached with an online media push. In the process, LPLS discovered remarkable innovative responses to dealing with local demand for unavailable goods — including hand washing stations, sanitisers, and PPE products. The exercise highlighted the limitation of typical grant funding cycles, and a gap in the reach of funders in an area that could hold great potential impact to local communities.
5. Retention of Value
To meet the continued needs of local communities, the length of time that products give value to the community must be maximised. Many products — particularly those produced overseas — have a short life cycle and product replacement is a considerable financial burden or simply may not be possible in low-income communities. For this reason, LMICs tend to have a strong informal repair economy. In building local production, a stronger focus should be placed on repairable design and additional routes to value retention. This can be done through providing training for repairing and maintenance, advocating for repairable design (including more modular design), and facilitating collaboration between producers and the informal sector — which offers great potential for enabling repair and retention of value.
6. Transparency and Visibility
To enable resilience, it is vital to provide ecosystem actors with system-wide data and intelligence, transparency, and visibility, to enable identification of opportunities, good decision-making, and risk analysis. This is true for both producers and investors.
Transparency: A lack of transparency in the ecosystem around ventures, results in missed opportunities to collaborate or access resources; and prevents investors from fully comprehending the ventures they may support.
Visibility: Innovators need to be visible, beyond typical marketing and branding. They must be visible to potential collaborators as well. By making their capacity and skills visible, their potential for business can be shown without being transparent enough to jeopardise their competitive edge.
The learnings shared here on ‘6 routes to building resilient production systems’ form a summary of a more detailed report, that can be found on the FCDO Frontier Technologies Hub website here. This more in-depth report shares case studies from innovators supported by LPLS, and the different ways they worked to support more resilient local production systems.
