Open Window: Local Production and Local Solutions for #COVIDaction

DFID’s Frontier Technologies Hub, in collaboration with the Royal Academy of Engineering, is building a technology and innovation pipeline for local production and local solutions. Local production and Local Solutions is one of the focus areas where we will be working to build a pipeline of technology and novel approaches to meet needs during the pandemic.

The pandemic has exposed vulnerabilities due to complex and interwoven global supply chains. These supply chains have made it difficult to gain access to life-saving, critical personal protective equipment (PPE) and even more day to day items that would typically be imported.

Across Lower and Middle Income Countries’ (LMICs) and globally, innovators are finding novel approaches to shorten supply chains, using local raw materials, pivot domestic manufacturing to supply local needs, from face masks to replacement parts for water pumps to needles for sewing machines. Mapping the manufacturing capability for each city or region, from the number of injection moulding machines to the number of 3D printers. Manufactures and suppliers utilise frontier technologies and maker spaces, and a raft of other innovative solutions to living and working in the new COVID context.

There is the need to lift the lid on the breadth of innovations, to share best practice across Africa and South Asia and to direct the development sector as well as local economies and ministries to priority solutions. The partnership will:

• SCAN and crowdsource innovative approaches mobilised on the ground in DFID countries and globally, which might need support or can be replicated elsewhere
• EVALUATE what we find alongside sector experts to cut through the noise and make sense of ‘what’s working’
• TEAM with promising innovators and support them with grant funding, expert technical assistance and matchmaking to programmes across DFID, other agency initiatives and beyond
• SHARE and map what we learn and uncover as a global, public good

We are crowdsourcing innovative approaches to local production and innovative solutions to the challenges of COVID-19 in LMICs:

LOCAL PRODUCTION: innovative manufacturing approaches and pivots resulting from existing manufacturing capacity as well as ways of tooling up (we are interested in PPE and prevention as well as other products in response to needs).

To apply, please see here.

LOCAL SOLUTIONS: local designs and innovative solutions the new COVID context (we are interested in PPE and prevention as well as other products in response to needs).

To apply, please see here.

Successful contributions will be mapped as a global good and made available to private sector buyers, DFID country offices and the development sector.

Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis beginning April 23. This is an open window, which will continue to update a picture of manufacturing solutions throughout the pandemic response.

This is part of an initiative led by DFID’s Frontier Technologies Hub ‘#COVIDaction: Building a Technology and Innovation Pipeline for the COVID Pandemic’, for more on the initiative please see here.

For questions about the calls, please contact the #COVIDaction Local Production and Local Solutions team at COVIDaction-Local@hellobrink.co