Distributed Manufacturing: Building Resilience through Local Manufacturers in a Post-COVID South Asia
How BRAC, one of the largest NGOs in the world, is leveraging local makerspaces, manufacturers, and open-source designs to make their responses on the ground more resilient
By Kuldeep Bandhu Aryal and Chathuri Weerasinghe.
When the overuse of the word ‘unprecedented’ becomes the most appropriate method to describe the aftereffects of a global pandemic, what many fail to observe is how the word ‘unprecedented’ itself acts as an indicator of the fragility of everything that we perceived was running well in pre-COVID times. Regardless of the struggles that were brought forth by the pandemic, costing the world many lives and economic pitfalls, the staggering reality that the world was not adequately equipped to cope with such a health crisis compels us to rethink everything that inhibits us from being resilient.
What became even further apparent is the unsustainability of the global supply chains that were evidently crippled by the international travel bans and lockdowns. The hard-hit supply chain industries around the world not only went through disruptions but also cost many lives because people were not able to protect themselves against the virus in time. The decades-long dependence on global sourcing and manufacturing processes resulted in nothing but a product crisis in the face of such adversity, particularly in critical items such as healthcare products, and the developing south depicted no different picture to the rest of the world. Panicked markets, shortages of critical equipment, and the stressed global supply chains are the pandemic’s way of suggesting that the existing socio-technical systems in the manufacturing sector require a paradigm shift.
The Need for a Resilient Local Manufacturer Network
Resilience can sprout from within the local community itself, provided the necessary external support is delivered effectively. The necessity of strengthening and encouraging such local responses to tackle global crises in order to pave the way to sustainable development, particularly in developing economies, has already been and continues to be highlighted by this pandemic. The paradigm shift that is needed in the manufacturing sector, thus, is a transition that shifts from an internationally dependent system to a local model, underpinned by local production and design. Distributed manufacturing technologies can create strong grounds for local manufacturing to be more sustainable, overall contributing to create a more resilient manufacturing sector.
Many initiatives to integrate distributed manufacturing networks into manufacturing processes are currently being explored or implemented in different parts of the world. In the global south, introducing such innovative interventions into the manufacturing system can not only catalyse the delivery of humanitarian responses but also scale up public and other services rendered by the development sector to the local communities. Opposed to a centralised manufacturing system where resources are concentrated in one place, a decentralised network of manufacturers constitutes a platform that facilitates the voluntary distribution of wealth across different manufacturers.
A decentralised network of manufacturers further creates grounds for market competition, paving the way to more innovations, consumer-friendly prices, and quality products and services. The ability distributed manufacturing possesses to create a system where everyday goods can be manufactured based on on-the-ground demands, customised, and are available within walking distances, while also merging information technology into the manufacturing system seems nothing less of an appropriate and sustainable response to thrive in a post-COVID digital economy.
A Prospective Market for Local Procurement
Considering the scale of the development and the humanitarian sectors especially in a developing country like Bangladesh, the market they generate for a prospective distributed manufacturing network is massive and diverse. On the one hand, 60–70% of the development sector’s expenses are often expended on procurement and supplies while on the other, the distribution of food items (FIs) and non-food items (NFIs) in the humanitarian context can also establish a huge demand for local manufacturing from the development sector’s end. While a considerable push springs from the humanitarian sector for the FIs to be locally manufactured, the majority of the NFIs are still being imported to the country.
Boosting local manufacturing is a promising channel through which international humanitarian agreements such as the Grand Bargain (World Humanitarian Summit Istanbul, 2016) can serve their ultimate purposes, creating impacts on communities in need on larger scales. Therefore, the idea that promoting local manufacturing itself is an indirect way of making a socioeconomic impact by creating a social surplus, while also utilising the development sector’s resources more efficiently needs to be instilled into the system and further capitalised.
Potential for Scale
As the largest non-governmental development organisation, BRAC is currently running its operations in 64 districts in Bangladesh but with a centralised, large-scale procurement system. BRAC has a demonstrated history of expertise in small innovations on a massive scale (massive-small innovations) that have especially resulted in the socio-economic empowerment of millions of poverty-stricken populations across the country. As these small innovations have matured over time and have expanded in scale, the need for a more decentralised procurement process that enables BRAC to perform needs assessments based on ground-level demands in shorter time spans has become rather inevitable.
Taking into account its countrywide presence and the scale of impact it can create, BRAC, therefore, has the potential to champion massive-small manufacturing in Bangladesh, while creating expanded possibilities to establish local manufacturer networks all across the country with the aims of bringing the manufacturers and consumers closer to each other.
During the pandemic, the BRAC Social Innovation Lab (SIL) collaborated with local makerspaces and FabLabs in Dhaka to manufacture personal protective equipment using digital fabrication methods such as 3D-printing. The BRAC Technology department, on the other hand, developed a data aggregation system, the ‘Data Tree’, to generate ground-level COVID-related data, particularly in order to track the demand and supply for personal protective equipment and respond accordingly. Considering their potential to complement each other, BRAC, therefore, opted for a combination of the two approaches, resulting in the designing of the currently proposed data aggregation platform. This provided BRAC the opportunity to work with Frontier Technology Livestreaming (FTL) to test the potential for data aggregation and distributed manufacturing in Bangladesh.
BRAC’s proposed data aggregation platform aims 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.
Existing procurement systems - in BRAC and in many other organisations - for instance, do not often favour small-scale manufacturers due to the scepticism that is held over the quality and the number of products manufactured by small-scale local producers. This has been identified as a challenge the proposed programme would experience at an implementation level, which therefore needs to be addressed internally by ensuring robust quality controls throughout the massive-small manufacturing processes BRAC suggests through the distributed manufacturing system.
Due to the ability they possess to manufacture highly customisable, easily accessible, and user-centric products, makerspaces and FabLabs are therefore the most viable and result-giving places to begin this innovation with, which BRAC hopes to commit to spread across the rest of the development sector and provide scope to mature over time and across Bangladesh.
Project Progress
BRAC is excited to utilise the collaboration with FTL for the successful design and testing of the distributed manufacturing platform, which is expected to be implemented in smaller but unique sprints. The first sprint has already been initiated in February this year.
Initially, the project team explored open-source product designs that were considered resourceful for BRAC programmes. More attention was paid towards products that were in high demand and simple product designs that are scalable, spanning from 3D printing to CNC to injection moulding. The identified designs were then narrowed down to products that have the ability to be produced based on the availability of raw materials in the local market (I.e., The quality and the availability of 3D printing filaments). The list of the product designs was further narrowed down based on the complexity of the design, factoring in the lack of availability of technology required in the local market to produce them (I.e., Compressors).
Following the identification of designs based on the above conditions, the team consulted with relevant stakeholders including the BRAC HNPP, HCMP, leadership and management bodies, and field managers regarding the selected designs, the platform, and their potential role in the proposed distributed manufacturing system. The discussions resulted in nothing but positive responses and enthusiasm from the programmes, and the idea of a platform where more than one design can be produced in relatively shorter time spans appeared to make the BRAC programmes even more ambitious towards the data aggregation and distributed manufacturing project.
Based on the stakeholder needs, the project team then expanded the product designs from 8 designs to more than 20, as it was discovered that the need for customised services at BRAC despite the scale in which they operate was significantly large. As is typically the case, large-scale operations require uniformity across solutions they render. However, the learning of the availability of a huge need for customised solutions at an organisation like BRAC, helped the team to further affirm that makerspaces would be the ideal way forward in producing customised innovations on large scales to act as solutions in the humanitarian and development sectors.
Following the identification of the demand for the products of interest, the team moved on to developing the distributed manufacturing platform, which was kick-started by building a wireframe structure. The task proceeded with a rough beginning as elaborating the concept to the platform developers became difficult due to the novelty of the concept. The team then moved on to finalising the product portfolio, which was later shared with all the relevant stakeholders.
The next step was to go to the field with the portfolio and begin the early process flow of the system. However, all on-the-ground operations were unfortunately halted due to COVID-19 and had to be shifted to virtual platforms. Virtual discussions with BRAC programmes HCMP and HNPP continued to take place and the project team managed to successfully engage around 30 people from these programmes in the discussions in total.
As the lockdown gradually eased, in terms of data aggregation, the team collaborated with the BRAC district coordinators under the BRAC Partnership Strengthening Unit (PSU), with the purpose of collecting field demand from reliable sources. With the PSU’s assistance, the team managed to collect on the ground demand for personal protective equipment within 24 hours from all 64 districts where BRAC operates, further verifying that data aggregation on the ground is possible and verifying that there is unmet demand for PPE.
The team identified and mapped around 20 makerspaces and FabLabs, the majority located in Dhaka and a few in Khulna, Rajshahi, Mymensingh, and Chittagong, who have the capability of producing the products for which the initial demand was received. Several other makerspaces that were operating at a lower capacity and quality than what is needed were also identified. Although these will not be integrated into the network for the time being, their existence validates that there is an opportunity to strengthen the sector, and that these makerspaces possess the ability to act as hubs for other local manufacturers if provided with the necessary capacity building and assistance. The team plans to further coordinate with FabLab SAU in order to deliver technical assistance to the identified makerspaces and FabLabs, particularly in terms of quality control and quality assurance practises.
Way Forward
Our findings and experience so far suggest that the demand for Personal Protective Equipment in Bangladesh is high and is largely unmet, which in turn indicates that the proposed solution needs to incorporate and engage additional actors beyond makerspaces in the system. Aside from the makerspaces’ ability to generate customised solutions, their capacity to become hubs for quality control for other local manufacturers also needs to be factored in as the project moves forward, which can help expand the scope of the project in the future.
Additionally, further light needs to be shed on how the project can utilise the resources and their scope to build the capacity of makerspaces that are currently located outside of Dhaka, as well as on how to create a robust quality control inside the platform.
At BRAC, we always believe that small is beautiful and scale is necessary. Being a part of establishing a distributed manufacturing network among the local manufacturers and as their largest demand-generating customer, we are setting the cornerstone in scaling up the robustness and the sustainability of the local manufacturing industry. However, we believe that structured partnerships and community contributions, by generating a larger market, can play a pivotal role in the successful continuation and further enhancement of the local manufacturing industry in Bangladesh, and thus collectively contributing to establishing sustainable supply chains across the country.
Written by Kuldeep Bandhu Aryal, Technology for Development Specialist at the Social Innovation Lab at BRAC, and Chathuri Weerasinghe, Development Studies Master’s student at BRAC University.
