Building Makerspaces for High-Impact in Low-Income Countries

Makerspaces in low and middle-income countries provide critical skills training and support for entrepreneurs in communities where existing infrastructure often falls short. The Gearbox Foundation will help build highly effective makerspaces in these communities and bring the tools of innovation to the people who need them most.

Makerspaces – shared workspaces with design, prototyping, and low-volume manufacturing equipment that offer training, access to equipment, workspace, and entrepreneurship support – serve vital roles promoting innovation in places where established infrastructure, such as universities, government, or corporate facilities, often fall short. These include skills training in fabrication and design, job creation through entrepreneurship and increased employability of members, and reducing the costs and risk of starting a business. In countries with few other such places, they serve as a center of gravity for talent, entrepreneurs, and investors, and provide an access point for typically excluded or disenfranchised communities to international networks of resources and support.

Unfortunately, high-impact makerspaces are extremely difficult to build in emerging market countries. They are resource intensive, the people building them often do not have the support needed to run a sophisticated prototyping and low-volume manufacturing facility, and their sustainability is contingent on scale (being large enough and able to offer a wide enough variety of services to be useful to members building world class products, and to generate sustainable revenue).

The Gearbox Foundation will build a support platform for makerspaces in emerging markets that aim to empower local entrepreneurs. Through technical support programs, reporting, and direct financial support (acting as a fiscal sponsor), the Foundation will help new and existing makerspaces solve many of the fundamental challenges unique to the makerspace model – finding funding, sourcing equipment, training staff, and building operational systems.

By offering a comprehensive set of back office tools, we will enable the leaders building these spaces to focus on their mission of finding, training, and supporting local engineers, designers, and entrepreneurs to build an economy that works for everyone.

In developed economies, many institutions serve the role of training tomorrow’s workers – universities, trade schools, on-the-job, and NGO/government programs. Poorer countries often lack this infrastructure, and makerspaces offer an alternative platform.

Most makerspaces are limited in their capacity to serve as high-impact resource centers. Those that can boast significant numbers of people trained, jobs created, or companies launched are typically 20,000 sq. ft. or larger, have an operating budget close to $1 million per year, and a full-time, professional staff. Gathering the resources to build and operate these spaces in low and middle-income countries is extremely difficult - but not impossible!

Over the last four years, we have grown Gearbox Kenya from a shipping container “workshop-in-a-box”, to a 2,500 sq. ft. prototyping lab, to a 20,000 sq. ft. makerspace in Nairobi.

Throughout that process, we have faced every challenge one could face in building a high-impact makerspace in a low-income country, and we have benefited greatly from strong partnerships with established innovation hubs around the world. We know that there are other spaces across the MENA region and elsewhere who would benefit from the same kind of deep, operational support that we are piloting in Kenya with the Gearbox Foundation.

While the recipients of the Foundation’s support will be the leaders of impact-oriented makerspaces in emerging markets, the ultimate beneficiaries will be the members of those spaces, the companies they launch, the workers they hire, and the communities they serve.

Because these impacts take effect downstream of the Foundation’s activities and after a time lag, our target outcomes focus on more immediately measurable goals: whether a supported makerspace is better able to serve hardware entrepreneurs, whether it can achieve sustainability through its own revenue, and whether the lessons learned can be applied to supporting new spaces in other countries.

Track incoming vs. outgoing productivity of five hardware startups at Gearbox Kenya over a 12 month period. - Prove that an impact-oriented makerspace can significantly improve the productivity of at least five hardware startups per year in an emerging market context.

Track revenue vs. expenditures at Gearbox Kenya, with a goal to achieve break-even two years after scale up investment. - Prove that an impact-oriented makerspace can build a self-sustaining business model in an emerging market context.

Track outcomes 1 and 2 across additional recipients of Foundation support to be identified in years one and two of the program. - Prove that the lessons learned building an impact-oriented makerspace in one country can be successfully applied in others.

Makerspaces are a new concept – the term was coined within the last ten years. Makerspaces in emerging markets are newer still.

Large-scale makerspaces with an explicit mission to promote social impact through skills training, entrepreneurship, and job creation are rare in any country, and those with the facilities to serve hardware entrepreneurs (e.g. conducting engineering and design validation and helping establish product/market fit through low-volume manufacturing) are virtually non-existent.

Gearbox Kenya is a “first of its kind” facility in this context, and no support platform for such spaces akin to the Gearbox Foundation currently exists.

One of the features of the makerspace model that is uniquely powerful in low and middle-income countries is that it does not tell members what to build – they are welcome to use the facility to design and build anything they like, and will find the tools and support they need to do it. By embedding these facilities within communities that face some of the world’s toughest challenges – such as poor sanitation, unreliable power, or low quality healthcare – we ensure that the solutions built are being designed by the people who live with these problems every day.

The Foundation’s programs are being designed to help the leaders of emerging market makerspaces build more effective, larger scale, and higher impact facilities by offering technical support (e.g. access to a network of experts around makerspace operations, employee exchanges with established facilities, and support developing a business model), reporting, and financial support (e.g. developing fundraising materials, monitoring and evaluation tools, and serving as fiscal sponsor). Our pilot and growth phase services will be entirely grant supported, at no cost to recipients, and deployed through one-on-one consulting arrangements, piloted at Gearbox Kenya and serving one to two recipients per year after. 

Given the difficulty inherent in building large-scale, impact-oriented makerspaces in emerging markets (something we know all too well after building Gearbox Kenya), our strategy focuses on depth over breadth, aiming to serve one to two spaces per year.

The specific mix of programs we offer will vary significantly depending on the needs of the supported makerspace, and our budget will fluctuate accordingly. At a minimum, we are seeking $150,000 annually to keep a base level of services available (the expert network, reporting, fiscal sponsorship, and back office support), but we aim to raise $3.5 - $5 million when a supported space is ready to make a significant investment in their facilities.

As a nonprofit, our mission is to offer these services at little or no cost to recipients, however we may be required to levy a fiscal sponsorship fee on funds raised for supported makerspaces when we reach scale. 

Our mission is to help makerspaces in emerging markets build more effective, higher impact, sustainable facilities and programs, and every makerspace defines these things differently.

We focus on creating impact through skills training, job creation, and entrepreneurship. These tend to require large-scale, sophisticated facilities, and our single greatest limiting factor is likely to be finding makerspaces in our target countries that are both aligned with this mission and ready to receive the $3-$5 million investment needed to bring such a space to sustainability, hence why our support programs are primarily designed around building management skills for this kind of facility.

https://medium.com/@cpbirkelo/building-makerspaces-for-the-4th-industrial-revolution-be51e5d76e22

Building Gearbox has been a collaborative effort from day one, and represents the cumulative efforts of countless individuals in Kenya and abroad over much more than just the last four years.

It is our unique community of support that helped us get this far. Through the Gearbox Foundation and with the help of Solve, we hope to both grow that community and make the depth of its resources, knowledge, and expertise available to everyone who is trying to build the workforce of the future in places where the need has never been greater. 

Gearbox Kenya

BRCK

iHub

Ushahidi

The Maker Network

We do not have competitors and welcome all collaborations.