After an unintentional six-month hiatus, I’m back to MindFields with a post about an event that encapsulates an emergent movement, geared towards unshackling Africa’s ingenuity and creative, problem-solving spirit. For much of this year, I’ve been busy working on a book project for the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa — traversing the continent collecting stories of some of the unseen successes coming out of African universities. So I landed at the University of Nairobi just in time to catch the tail end of the second annual Maker Faire Africa, a gathering of tinkerers, designers, artists and inventors, all keen to share and grow their innovations.

The event, curated by New York-based blogger and entrepreneur Emeka Okafor, and convened by a group of bloggers, stemmed from their realization that Africa — a continent which according to stereotypes produces little — in fact holds a great wealth of backyard tinkerers and inventors, Okafor says. This creative class works largely unsupported and in obscurity, offering a sort of unacknowledged wellspring of productive creativity that could be harnessed to generate wealth and development on the continent. What they lack is the necessary access to markets, networks and resources to scale up their products and make themselves known.

The Maker Faire is an attempt to bring these isolated problem-solvers together to build platforms for their ideas to spread. “It is essentially an effort to validate these brilliant individuals,” Okafor told me. “Hopefully over a period of time we’re building an auto-catalytic, self-sustaining community that builds on its own strengths and its own resources. We hope that a lot of what happens will be emergent and self-directed, as opposed to us laying down what the rules should be.”

Under the white tents erected in a courtyard at the university, Makers traveling from as far as South Africa and Wales display their inventions and share their hopes of making it big. Norbert Okec, a retired chemist from Uganda, displays a solar-powered traffic light that he assembled from LED’s and scrap materials. “The idea behind this was to keep it as simple as possible. It’s an open-source project, and so it is easy to imitate, and improve,” he says. The project developed as a response to Kampala’s pervasive gridlock — an increasingly common problem that in many African cities is exacerbated by a lack of working traffic lights.

In other corners, young designers share a mobile phone game they created in the aftermath of Kenya’s post-election violence, called GetH20, in hopes of spreading messages to other youth about the necessities of cooperating and conserving scarce resources. Students from the University of Nairobi’s Fab Lab give cool and colorful demonstrations of their computer-controlled tools, which cut out patterns on demand, according to a designer’s specs. Students from MIT showcase the internet mesh network they are setting up around Nairobi. Another young woman from a local architectural firm shares her story of helping to create a communal stove in the slum of Kibera, which burns the garbage that chokes the city’s rivers.

Across this space, the village meets the blogosphere. Challenge turns to opportunity. Water and electricity scarcity. Potholed roads and poor communication networks — These are the sorts of problems that spur ingenuity and inspire solutions.

Michael Oware Onyango and Absalom Odera, business partners from the village of Dunga in Kisimu, created a hardy bicycle, the Masiro 2010, designed for farmers and other village sellers who transport their heavy loads on forbidding rural roads. The sturdy frame made from welded pipes supports loads of up to 250 kilos, and boasts shock absorbers and an emergency brake, as well as a pedal-powered phone charger — which is a boon for rural entrepreneurs in areas that lack electricity.

Other ideas are too diverse and too interesting to do justice to here. For nearly everyone, though, lack of capital remains the biggest obstacle to overcoming isolation and scaling up. One inventor displays his cardboard prototype of a grain drying room, which uses moisture sensors to automatically close an open rooftop in the event of rain, in order to avoid the spoilage which drastically reduces Africa’s crop yields. He dips the end of the wire he has rigged into water, causing the roof to slide shut. “I would like to make this from real materials and not a cardboard box,” he says. “But I make use of what I have.”

On a continent where perhaps 10% of the population has Internet access, I find fascinating this attempt to bring people together and let their interactions shape new directions and processes, in the same organic, unplanned vein as so many Internet communities have coalesced, with unforeseen and unforeseeable results.  “I would call it massively parallel cross-pollination,” says Okafor. “It’s inter-disciplinary, it’s un-siloed, but it’s actually quite nourishing. That’s my succinct description of what I think is going on.”

Other Makers echo similar sentiments in plainer language. Onyango and Odera, the bicycle-makers, have come away with new contacts and ideas for innovations to add to their bikes. The challenges of overcoming isolation, attracting finance and reaching markets are not going away any time soon. But hopefully as venues such as this one emerge and build momentum, so will new pathways to creative fulfillment and prosperity.

Okec, the Ugandan traffic light inventor, is optimistic: “I’ve got cards from venture capitalists, from engineers. I didn’t expect this,” he says. “I really want the Maker Faire to come to Kampala.”

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