Maker Faire Africa comes to Jo’Burg

Maker Faire Africa was first held in Ghana in 2009, then Kenya 2010, Egypt 2011, Nigeria 2012 and now in South Africa 2014. It’s been an amazing thing to be a part of, and the best is to be there and see the local ingenuity, the practical inventions that are made by some of the smartest and scrappiest people in Africa.

Maker Faire Africa 2014

Makers from across Africa will join ZA Makers for 4-days of meet-ups, mash-ups, workshops, and seed-starting ideas for new collaborations in open innovation across the continent.

When: Sept 3-6, 2014
Where: WITS (University of the Witwatersrand), exact location TBD
Who: You + all the other Makers, just sign up

Maker Faire Pop-Up Makerspace

Maker Faire Africa 2014 will bring together over 5,000 attendees, along with featured inventors, world-class makers, self-made entrepreneurs & workshop experts from South Africa, across the continent, and around the world, to manufacture real solutions for some of Africa’s most pressing challenges & opportunities in the areas of agriculture, health, education, power, and more. Whether your interest lies in technology, engineering, science, humanities, design or fabrication, you’ll find the best grouping of enthusiastic hardware innovators at MFA 2014.

At the heart of the Maker Faire Africa Community experience is our Pop-Up Maker Space – facilitated through a collaboration between local hackerspaces & volunteers and visiting world-class makers. Open the full length of the faire, it caters to all ages, skill levels, and interests. Visitors can organize their own impromptu maker projects using available tools & supplies, attend demonstrations such as 3D-Printing Indigenous Patterns, Light Up Your Gele, or Strawberry DNA Extraction, or participate in supervised workshops such as Learn to Solder, Solar Energy for Personal Power, Microelectronics 101 or AfriRobotics for Beginners.

MFA is structured to encourage visitors to actively make, not just observe. We integrate students and professionals alongside informal inventors in a way not happening elsewhere across Africa.

Some school girl makers in Nigeria 2012

Some school girl makers in Nigeria 2012

Handmade hydraulic toys at MFA 2012 in Nigeria

Handmade hydraulic toys at MFA 2012 in Nigeria

“Solutions for Africa’s economic growth must emanate from Africa to be wholly understood and integrated. Maker Faire Africa has the potential to be the birth- place of African invention fundamental to the continent’s development… these are Africa’s unsung heroes, as it is their understanding of what is needed, rather than what is simply cool, that translates into the most valuable economic asset on the continent today.”
– Deo Onyango, GE Commercial Development Director for East Africa

Handmade Fashion Glasses - MFA Kenya 2010

Handmade Fashion Glasses – MFA Kenya 2010

(crosspost from Whiteafrican.com)

A Urine Powered Generator

Possibly one of the more unexpected products at Maker Faire Africa this year in Lagos is a urine powered generator, created by four girls. The girls are Duro-Aina Adebola (14), Akindele Abiola (14), Faleke Oluwatoyin (14) and Bello Eniola (15).

1 Liter of urine gives you 6 hours of electricity.

The system works like this:

  • Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which separates out the hydrogen.
  • The hydrogen goes into a water filter for purification, which then gets pushed into the gas cylinder.
  • The gas cylinder pushes hydrogen into a cylinder of liquid borax, which is used to remove the moisture from the hydrogen gas.
  • This purified hydrogen gas is pushed into the generator.

Along the whole way there are one-way valves for security, but let’s be honest that this is something of an explosive device…

EUR 50k award up for grabs in international appropriate tech competition

Here’s a call to all AfriGadget innovators to submit their “appropriate technical solutions” (= products and service ideas) to an international competition which was recently initiated by Siemens Stiftung (Foundation):

Siemens empowering people award

“We are looking for relatively simple, appropriate technical products and solutions in the categories Water & Waste Water, Energy, Food & Agriculture, Waste Management & Recycling, Healthcare, Housing & Construction and Information & Communication Technology in order to fulfil basic needs of people in developing and emerging countries. Each product or solution to be submitted has to be either already implemented in a project or needs at least a prototype with a proof of concept.”

(src: FAQs)

“The project also aims to build up a database of inventions that is accessible to actors in developmental cooperation.”, the FAQ go on explaining. This actually really is the sweetest part next to the 50k EUR prize for the 1st winner, because such a database on inventions is often asked for. Here’s a good example of such a database, initiated by Engineering for Change (E4C). Let’s hope they’ll also open it up to the public and not only keep it accessible to dev aid coops only.

They also address the issue of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and state that “all intellectual properties will remain with the developer/ developing team”. This is an important step because many innovators actually don’t want submit their ideas to such competitions which are often only for pooling smart ideas – and then cashing in on the potential. For those of you who are looking for some historical explanations of IPR in many African countries, here’s an interesting paper on the topic by Kenyan economist James Shikwati (ex 2004, though).

Utamu wa kazi ni…

Talking about empowering innovations that turn into businesses, here’s a smart approach ex Tanzania: Global Cycle Solutions, a “social enterprise working to disseminate affordable, quality technology for villagers around the world”.

“Uhm, a social enterprise?”, you may ask. Social enterprises may not be on everyone’s agenda when it comes to traditional business, but their products, man, the products are sweet – and hence qualify to be mentioned as AfriGadget solutions (with such a delay, considering that the following product was launched in 2009 – apologies!):

GCS Maize Sheller Kit
GCS Maize Sheller Kit

A detachable maize sheller kit that fills a 90kg sack of maize in 40 minutes and which may be removed for transport. The machine is said to pay for itself within a month and costs 60 US-$. The project also reminds us of the many other “bicycle-related” blog posts on AfriGadget. Bicycles certainly are the multi-machines in many African countries.

Or how about the GCS Bicycle-powered Kiwia Phone Charger?
GCS Bicycle-powered Kiwia Phone Charger

The GCS Bicycle-powered Kiwia Phone Charger is just another one of those mobile phone chargers that certainly sell better than the Nokia alternative – just because it’s locally available and probably also cheaper.

So there you have it – local products that also sell. How? On their blog, GCS write: “…GCS has finally figured out a sales model that works for us. With a car and PA system, and a nice spacious tent, we are having profitable road shows at the time…”.

Have a smart business idea that you’d like to cash in and which would qualify for the “empowering people. Award”? Then hurry up and submit your entry up to December 31, 2012! All winners of the competition will be announced in summer 2013. Good luck!