Written by On April 18 and 19, 2025, makers filled the GrEEK Campus in downtown Cairo for the tenth edition of Maker Faire Cairo. A robotics demo ran next to a calligraphy station. A workshop on AI powered design sat beside a class on shaping bioplastics. The theme was Dots Connected, and after ten years the phrase read less like a slogan and more like a description of what had been happening in that space since 2015. San3a Tech, the Cairo company behind the event, calls it one of the largest DIY festivals in the Middle East and North Africa.
San3a Tech describes itself as a social enterprise, started by young Egyptians to democratize technical innovation and personalized manufacturing. The company works through three arms: Fab Lab Egypt, San3a Academy, and Maker Faire Cairo. By its own count, the network has reached over 300,000 beneficiaries, supported more than 50 fablabs and makerspaces in 5 countries, and helped produce over 7,000 digitally fabricated projects.
Origins
The story begins in 2012, four years before San3a Tech existed as a company. A group of young Egyptians founded Fab Lab Egypt and joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Fab Lab global network that same year. The lab gave anyone in Cairo access to 3D printers, laser cutters, and other digital fabrication tools, for robotics, furniture, or whatever else someone wanted to build. San3a Tech was founded in 2016 as the parent company for Fab Lab Egypt and the programs that grew around it.
Maker Faire Cairo, a Decade On
Maker Faire Cairo is the most visible of those programs. It started in 2015 at the GrEEK Campus with support from the U.S. Embassy and Intel, and drew over 3,000 people in its first year. By 2017, attendance had passed 11,000. The faire kept going through the pandemic on a hybrid format, shipping DIY kits and running virtual sessions to keep the community together.
Ten years after that first edition, the anniversary faire dropped the themed zones that had organized past editions. In their place, San3a Tech built what Make: magazine’s coverage called a persona-based, flow-driven structure, where a visitor could move between a soldering station, a woodworking demo, and a talk on satellite engineering without following a fixed route. Makers were treated as participants rather than exhibitors, with time built into the schedule for them to experience the faire themselves, between demos.
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo, primary supporter of the anniversary edition alongside the American Center Cairo, counted over 50 workshops, 8 demonstrations, and 15 exhibits across the two days, with more than 2,000 makers taking part. Embassy spokesperson Gina Cabrera linked the gathering to the wider relationship between the two countries.
The event brought in international guests: inventor and YouTuber Simone Giertz from Sweden, open-source and accessibility advocate Saad Chinoy from Singapore, architect Leila Yunis. The lineup also included circular economy specialist Jay Cousins, embedded systems developer Violet Su from Taiwan, and space technology engineer Abdullah Al Salmani from the UAE. Egyptian makers shared the same billing: visual artist Dina Amin, woodworker Wael Muhammad working in the Japanese Kumiko style, children’s book illustrator Sarah Marey, jewelry designer Eman El Banna, and upcycling artist Tram Alwan.
Some of the faire’s makers came up through San3a Tech’s own community. Hamza Mahmoud, known online as Hamza681, is a Cairo teenager who builds electronic toys and games out of simple materials. He caught the attention of Maker Faire Cairo organizers in 2022 and exhibited again the year after. He posts his builds on TikTok as @hamza681official and on Instagram as @HAMZA681, and says he wants to show other kids that inventing things is within reach with a bit of curiosity and basic tools.
Beyond the Faire: Regional Partnerships
Since 2013, San3a Tech has run Solidarity Fab Lab,a network of mini fab labs across five governorates: Zagazig, Ismailia, Mansoura, Asyut, and Aswan, supported by Orange. Each node gives its community access to machines and technical support, and the network reaches over 5,000 people a year.
In 2022, that regional footprint extended into education. Girls Make, funded by Chevron and run through San3a Tech’s educational arm San3a Academy, is a summer program built to get girls into STEM through maker education and digital fabrication. The first cycle closed in September 2022, with 47 girls graduating from four governorates: Cairo, Alexandria, Zagazig, and Asyut. The ceremony took place at Sultan Hussein Kamel Palace, with Chevron’s country managers and an undersecretary from the Ministry of Petroleum in attendance.
Chevron later profiled one of the program’s participants, a girl named Magda, on its own site. She said the program gave her the ability to express ideas and communicate on a different level. San3a Academy’s education manager, Lamiaa Nail, later presented Girls Make as a case study at the FabLearn Conference at Columbia University, with Chevron credited as strategic partner.
By 2023, San3a Tech’s partnerships had grown to match. In March of that year, the company ran the first IoT bootcamp in Egypt as part of the European Commission-funded HUBiquitous H2020 program, in partnership with District Spaces and led by San3a Tech’s Ahmad Saeed. Over three days, 20 participants learned the basics of Internet of Things applications and design thinking, then pitched project ideas as teams. The bootcamp fed into the Hubiquitous Talent Program, aimed at African tech communities between 17 and 35 years old.
That same month, San3a Tech partnered with Goethe Institute Cairo to mark Arduino Day, opening the Goethe Creative Space for a day built around smart gardening. Visitors painted plant pots, then wired moisture sensors to Arduino boards to automate watering, before touring the space’s 3D printers and VR sets. The Goethe partnership runs deeper than a single event: the two organizations also produce Goethe MakerCast, a podcast on the maker movement now in its third season, hosted by San3a Tech’s managing director Omar Essafty.
The most recent chapter in that expanding footprint is climate work.
Climate Work
In 2024, San3a Academy education manager Lamiaa Nail presented the company’s approach at a World Bank session on the maker movement and climate solutions. Her slides walked through projects built inside the network: Reblox, which turns waste into building material; Plastale, which turns waste into furniture; Cavani Textiles, which turns waste into fiber and dye; and VeryNile, which uses open source hardware, including Precious Plastic shredders and injection machines, to clean the Nile.
The same presentation covered San3a Tech’s Maker Diploma, an eleven-week program that has produced smart solar trackers, a smart window shade based on the traditional mashrabia, and a smart greenhouse, plus Maker Classroom, which uses e-textiles and storytelling to raise climate awareness in schools.
Dots Connected
Fab Lab Egypt opened as one makerspace in 2012. San3a Tech became the company behind it in 2016. Ten years after Maker Faire Cairo’s first edition, the same team runs climate programs with the World Bank, IoT bootcamps funded by the European Commission, girls’ STEM programs with Chevron, and a fab lab network stretching from Alexandria to Aswan. Dots Connected turned out to be more than a theme for Maker Faire Cairo. It’s simply how San3a Tech has worked all along.
San3a Tech’s own channels:
– website (https://www.san3atech.com)
– Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/san3atech/)
– Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/san3atech/)
– LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/san3atech)
Maker Faire Cairo keeps its own presence too:
– website (https://makerfairecairo.com/)
– Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/makerfairecairo/)
– Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/makerfairecairo/)
– YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@makerfairecairo)
