Why Hardware for Development?
Making physical, tangible things is more powerful, more important, and more meaningful than you may think.
I first learned about makerspaces as a concept in Ethiopia (the first one I ever visited was iceaddis in Addis Ababa), so to me, it has always seemed perfectly natural that open-access spaces for building manufacturable products — hardware — would be called makerspaces, that they clearly have a role to play in economic development, and that they tend to be full of exactly the kind of creative, talented, and hard-working people that I like to be surrounded by.
But that’s not what first sparked my interest in hardware for development. That story begins with a visit to a dairy cooperative six years ago. My dad runs agricultural development programs in Ethiopia (my grandfather taught city planning in Nigeria, so you could say it’s a family thing), and I was staying with him in Addis Ababa for a few months. One day, he brought me along for a visit to one of the cooperatives he works with. His agency had just donated a mechanical cream separator to the coop, and they needed some help setting it up.
My other grandfather was a dairy farmer, and I grew up in rural South Dakota, so it’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I had never seen a cream separator to this point. I really had no idea what it was, other than what the name tells you. I could read an English-language user manual though, and I have a background in building things. With my dad’s guidance, we had the machine up and running in a couple hours and left.
I’m afraid I don’t know how long the cooperative kept using that machine, or if it ultimately helped them improve their productivity. They may well have scrapped it for parts by now. Still, at that point I had done some work in the development sector — been a consultant, done some research, written a few reports — and this was the first time I felt like I had done anything that actually mattered. No matter how they used that machine going forward, the farmers at that cooperative understood mechanics a little better (the importance of lubrication was one particular lesson that afternoon). Farmers everywhere tend to be jacks of all trades by necessity (my granddad the dairy farmer could build or fix just about anything), and these Ethiopian farmers were now slightly better equipped to build and fix the tools of their trade.
Why Hardware Matters
It was a small success to be sure, one that I played only a minor part in, but from that day on, I’ve tried to focus on helping people make things. For the last four years, I’ve had the privilege of working with the team at Gearbox Kenya to build Kenya’s first open-access makerspace for design and fabrication, and we set up the Gearbox International Foundation to help others build similar spaces around the world.
Gearbox Kenya’s members are making everything from “pay as you go” irrigation systems to 3D printed surgical training models. Some of them are building biomass power generators for rural farmers, others make point-of-sale devices designed for urban SMEs. One thing they have in common is that they are all building physical, tangible products.
We use the word “hardware” to differentiate from software and mobile technology — most tech hubs, incubators, accelerators, or coworking spaces around the world cater to entrepreneurs in software and mobile services. Gearbox is dedicated to manufacturing.
Why focus on hardware and manufacturing in a country where more than 40% of the population live below the poverty line, where there are so many urgent problems to solve?
There are a lot of good reasons not to. Doing anything in hardware is expensive, requiring large, up-front investments in facilities, materials, and equipment. It’s difficult, needing advanced skills in design, engineering, logistics, and supply chain management, to name a few. It may not be possible to make something locally for less than it costs to import the same thing, often at higher quality. To top it all off, small-scale, hi-tech manufacturing may not create very many jobs (at least not directly), and large-scale, low-tech manufacturing has to compete with existing supply chains across Asia that have a 40-year head start.
We focus on hardware at Gearbox for much the same reason that I spent an afternoon helping farmers set up a cream separator in Ethiopia six years ago. Software sure wasn’t going to help them process their milk faster. In spite of the difficulties, the benefits of building tangible, physical things — of manipulating the built environment at any scale — can only be achieved by getting your hands dirty and making something.
Hardware matters for three big reasons:
- Manufacturing is at the heart of every productive economy. Whether it constitutes 5% or 50% of GDP, the capacity to manufacture complex physical products has spillover effects that boost every other sector. No country has ever become rich without first developing their manufacturing sector, and no other indicator is a better predictor of economic growth than the complexity of the products a country can make.
- Of the problems facing the poorest communities around the world, many of them require hardware solutions — e.g. sanitation, clean energy, food security, affordable and safe housing. Technology can’t solve any problem on its own, but of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, at least 11 will require either the development of new hardware technologies, or the adaptation and cost-effective deployment of existing hardware.
- Ultimately, hardware is freedom. The ability to design the built world around you is a fundamental part of the human experience — across all times and every culture, we are creators, whether we’re building handicrafts or spacecraft. Communities that are not able to design and build the things that make up their daily lives will forever be on the receiving end of change, and dependent on either the goodwill or the profit motive of others to design their world for them.
Complexity is a Feature
“Products are vehicles for knowledge.” In the Atlas of Economic Complexity, Hausmann and Hidalgo (et al.) provide a network map of the global “product space” based on trade data — that is, which products tend to be made together in the same places, and how each connects to the other. Countries that make one product are more likely to possess the tacit knowledge, skills, and capabilities required to make other products that are closely connected (it’s easier to move from making doors to making furniture than to pharmaceuticals).
The biggest, most connected cluster (the blue one, right in the middle) is machinery. An economy with the embedded knowledge to produce a wide variety of machines and machine tools is well poised to expand into a huge number of other products. Machines and machine tools are used in agriculture, textiles, automotive production, electronics, construction, you name it. They require a huge range of skills to design, manufacture, sell, ship, and maintain, but it is this very complexity that makes the making of them such a powerful engine for growth.
That cream separator my dad and I helped set up in Ethiopia was made in India. One of our concerns was whether or not the coop would be able to maintain or repair the machine, or find spare parts when needed. Ethiopia may still be a long way from being able to profitably manufacture these machines locally, but when they do, there will be an entire value chain of parts suppliers, truck drivers, maintenance technicians, and salespeople, all working to support farmers who need their own transportation, refrigeration, distribution, and retail networks. A vast array of complex economic activity surrounds the use of one, relatively simple, machine (and the countless others that complement it).
Embedding the productive knowledge in an economy to produce complex machinery may not be easy, but every economic revolution of the last 200 years has been an industrial revolution. Supporting designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs who are bringing locally appropriate machinery to market is one of the best ways to boost productivity in every sector from agriculture to construction, healthcare, sanitation, transportation, and more.
Hardware Solves the Hard Problems
One of the great accomplishments of the early 21st century has been the birth of the digital service economy as an alternative to farming, toiling in factories, or traditional services (like haircutting) as a way to earn a living. Pioneers like the iHub, alongside new companies such as Andela, are bringing well-paying digital service jobs to countries that need all of the high-quality jobs they can get, and ICT’s have been the fastest growing sector of the Kenyan economy for much of the last 15 years. Some problems can’t be solved by software, though.
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals include things like “end poverty in all its forms everywhere” and “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. Some of them, like “reduce inequality within and among countries” can hopefully be addressed through good policy making. Others, like “ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all” will require a mix of technical and policy innovations. Of the 17 goals, 11 will almost certainly require some form of physical, tangible technology as part of the solution — that is, hardware:
Many of these challenges are felt far more acutely in poor countries than in rich ones. Yet without expanding the ability to design and manufacture the tools needed to solve them, their solutions will only be developed in rich countries. The problems of “white savior tech” are well-known — the fields of Africa are littered with the abandoned irrigation projects and unmaintainable tractors of well-meaning donors.
The solution is to invest in permanent local infrastructure for hardware innovation. Without it, we are relying on less than 20% of the world’s population to solve problems that are only lived by the other 80%.
Hardware as Freedom
Whether you’re looking to build a complex, productive economy or to solve the hardest problems facing the globe, if you need hardware to do it, you are faced with a choice: either make it locally, or import from abroad. For those things that can be economically produced close to where they are used, there is one overriding argument for doing so — hardware is freedom.
Amartya Sen coined the phrase “development as freedom”. The ultimate goal of development is to remove the constraints people face towards living the lives they want to live. Things like poverty, famine, poor health, and tyranny all prevent people from being able to live their idea of The Good Life. Things like GDP growth are not goals in and of themselves, but tools to help people realize their hopes and aspirations. Crucially, these are self-defined. A variety of individual, family, and communal values and institutions shape our expectations for how we should want to live, but development can be captured in one single metric: how free is a person to achieve the life that they, themselves, would choose?
The ability to design and build the things that make up our daily interactions with the physical world — our houses, our clothes, our furniture, our cars, our phones, the tools we use to do our work — is one of these freedoms. That is not to say that someone who builds their own furniture is more free than someone who buys it — The Good Life is self-defined — but entire communities that are deprived of the option to build the things they use because they do not have access to the knowledge, the skills, the tools, or the resources to do so are not free. The choices they can make for how they want to live their lives are constrained.
In Nairobi, “Made in Kenya” is usually not a badge of honor. Products with that stamp are often relegated to the bottom shelf in the markets, clearly inferior to the imports above. If you want cheap and cheerful, it comes from China. Middlebrow is probably from India, while the best of the best comes from Europe or the United States. The message, received loud and clear by many of Kenya’s brightest young minds, is that if you want to make things on par with the best of the best, you have to leave Kenya to do it, because you can’t do it here.
Hardware is not about Things
The best and brightest of any community shouldn’t feel like they have to leave home to do work that matters. The tools with which a complex, productive economy are built shouldn’t all have to come from somewhere else. And the solutions to problems that shape the lives of the largest part of humanity won’t come only from its richest.
Hardware is made up of things, but its importance is not about the things themselves. It is about what they represent, the capabilities they enable, and how they shape our relationship with the physical world. Development can’t just be about producing more, it has to be about producing better. It can’t just be about scaling up access to the creature comforts of a rich-world lifestyle — we need to redefine what it means to be rich.
That means finding ways to make things that leave the people and the planet that make them better off. That won’t happen if the means of making are only available in rich countries. Everyone, everywhere deserves the right to design the world they want to live in, and some of the best ideas for building a more sustainable and just world are coming from the places you might least expect.
For further reading:
- “The Atlas of Economic Complexity,” Center for International Development at Harvard University, http://www.atlas.cid.harvard.edu
- Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999), https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SEFLIY/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
