<strong>Celebrating the Innovation Global Project and Its Online Exhibition</strong>

Celebrating the Innovation Global Project and Its Online Exhibition

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
Innovation is a powerful force that can drive social and economic development, especially in the Global South. Unfortunately, the distorted image portrayed by media often obscures the potential of digital innovations in countries in the Global South. As a result, Global Innovation Gathering (GIG) took on the challenge of highlighting the developmental potential of digital innovations from countries in the Global South. Fab Lab Nepal - Picture by Pradita Pradham The GIG's Innovation Global Project is now in its last month, culminating in online and offline exhibitions showcasing Global South innovations. The project addressed the problem of the distorted image of the Global South in the media and the need for more information about inventions from the Global South. Changing this perception is essential to promote collaboration and partnerships to drive social and economic development. The project targeted three groups: development cooperation organizations, innovators and hubs, and digitally interested public members. Development cooperation organizations are already aware of the potential of bottom-up approaches...
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Building an Inclusive Future: The Africa Makerspace Network

Building an Inclusive Future: The Africa Makerspace Network

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
In recent years, makerspaces have emerged as a powerful force for innovation and community building in cities worldwide. These shared workspaces provide access to tools, technology, and resources often out of reach for individuals and small organizations. They also serve as a hub for collaboration, experimentation, and skill-sharing. But while the benefits of makerspaces are clear, they are not equally accessible to everyone. In many parts of the world, makerspaces are concentrated in urban areas and are often dominated by privileged groups. This creates a significant barrier for individuals and communities who need more resources or connections to access these spaces. The Africa Makerspace Network (AMN) is working to change this. AMN is a network of makerspaces and innovation hubs across Africa committed to creating inclusive spaces for innovation, learning, and entrepreneurship. Their mission is to build a network of African makerspaces that are accessible and sustainable and connect them with the global maker movement. AMN was founded in 2019 by a...
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Africa Lawyers Hub: Empowering African Lawyers to Drive Positive Change

Africa Lawyers Hub: Empowering African Lawyers to Drive Positive Change

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
Africa Lawyers Hub is a non-profit organization that aims to empower African lawyers to drive positive change in their communities. The organization was founded in 2020 to connect lawyers across Africa and provide them with the resources and support they need to make a meaningful impact in their countries. One of the critical ways Africa Lawyers Hub achieves this goal is through its mentorship program. The program matches experienced lawyers with young professionals just starting their careers. The mentors provide guidance and support to the mentees, helping them to navigate the legal profession and to develop the skills they need to be successful. In addition to the mentorship program, Africa Lawyers Hub provides various other resources to its members. These include access to legal training, continuing education opportunities, and a network of legal professionals who can provide support and advice. The organization also hosts events and workshops to bring its members together and to provide them with opportunities to learn from one...
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Celebrating three years of CoAct: Ending Cycles

Celebrating three years of CoAct: Ending Cycles

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
During the last 36 months, the Global Innovation Gathering helped CoAct project deliver Citizen Social Science concepts and practices to more than 1,6 million people, using a wide range of communication strategies and tools, combined with intense resilience and creativity during the COVID-19 pandemic.  CoAct (Co-designing Citizen Social Science for Collective Action) proposes a radically new approach to facing global social issues by engaging vulnerable citizens as co-researchers. The strategy represents a new account of Citizen Social Science, understood here as participatory research co-designed and directly driven by citizen groups sharing a social concern. CoAct's research approach, where citizen groups and their problems are at the core of the research questions, requires translating those attributes for its communicative and dissemination activities. Furthermore, CoAct's shared values - Inclusiveness, Horizontality, Equity, Trust and Respect, Open Science, Co-ownership, Empowerment, and Reflexivity - underlined the direction and structure of CoAct's communication, dissemination and exploitation Work Package, led by the Global Innovation Gathering inside a consortium partnership. The first year...
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Fostering Egypt’s development through The Make and Innovation perspective

Fostering Egypt’s development through The Make and Innovation perspective

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
San3a Tech is a social enterprise established by young Egyptians to democratize technical innovation and build an impactful community of makers. It is also one of the Global Innovation Gathering hub members since 2022. Egypt faces a critical problem of missing the importance of research and development in the community and its effect on the industry and the Egyptian economy. Therefore, there needs to be an environment to bring together people interested in making, innovation and technology. The main challenges faced by Egypt today include the following: Lack of hands-on learning techniques in schools and universities in Egypt, although Education and training are crucial to national's industry development, economic growth and political stability. The Egyptian vocational schools need to provide the industry with qualified and skilled technicians. Craftsmanship produces low-quality creations due to different reasons. Co-innovating in MENA region These were the main drivers for San3a Tech founders to start the grass-root initiative in March 2012 through Fab Lab Egypt at first, followed by several projects and...
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Gertrude Mawuena Goh – Inspirational stories about gender-inclusive making

Gertrude Mawuena Goh – Inspirational stories about gender-inclusive making

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
Gertrude Mawuena GohAfrican Makerspace Network, Ghana Gertrude is currently working as an Executive Manager on the Africa Makerspace Network, a community of African Makerspaces. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the University of Ghana. “The more such stories spread, the more other women would view it as normal and develop an interest to join.” Gertrude’s first contact with the maker community was through organizing the 2nd African Makerspace Gathering in 2020.  It took her some time and reading to understand the concept and ideas behind making and makerspaces.  There were hardly any women in the organization team when Gertrude started her work for the Makerspace Gathering. As a project leader, she had to coordinate and chase her team to get things done – but realized that some would refuse.  “When I faced this challenge, I was asking myself a lot of questions: is it because I am new to the team, or because I am a woman?“ She put in extra hard...
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What is Solarpunk? Why does it matter?

What is Solarpunk? Why does it matter?

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
In this podcast series, Tomasino and GIG supervisory board member Pawel Ngei discusses Solarpunk as a movement within art, literature, and activism. He explores its themes and discusses what separates it from its genre peers. Each episode explores a writing prompt set in a Solarpunk aesthetic with examples and inspirations from today's world. It's a pretty common criticism of Solarpunk as a budding genre. In aiming to paint a utopian and highly aesthetic vision of a better world, many authors leave many politics and potential struggles out of their stories. We don't need to avoid politics or community conflicts, even open struggles in our dreams of a better tomorrow.  Pawel Ngei Listen to the podcasts on their website: Solarpunk Prompts (@SolarpunkPrompts) or click on the link below to listen to it on your preferred platform ...
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GIG is hiring: <br>Support Ukrainian Makers with Project Tolocar

GIG is hiring:
Support Ukrainian Makers with Project Tolocar

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
GIG is…. Global Innovation Gathering (GIG) is a vibrant, diverse community of innovation hubs, makerspaces, hackerspaces and other grassroots innovation community spaces and initiatives, as well as individual innovators, makers, technologists and changemakers.  GIG is pursuing a new vision for global cooperation based on equality, openness and sharing. We aim to enable more diversity in the production of technology and global innovation processes and support open and sustainable solutions developed by grassroots innovators. With solid roots in the global south, GIG provides a platform for meaningful exchange by fostering knowledge sharing and collaboration between its members. We're thrilled to announce a new project supporting makers in Ukraine by connecting them with makers from the GIG network, facilitating exchange and co-creating open hardware projects for local needs. Some of our members are already part of the project, e.g. creating mobile makerspaces. You can learn more at https://tolocar.org/en/ Therefore, we are looking for two people to join our team as soon as possible: Position 1_ Project Coordinator  We...
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Sailing on Knowledge Waves

Sailing on Knowledge Waves

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
In 2014, Nave à Vela - a start-up co-founded by GIG member Miguel Chaves in Brazil - has the purpose of, in partnership with schools, building a more meaningful education, promoting increasingly innovative teaching, and respecting the particularities and reality of each school. The mission is to transform schools into places where students' creativity and curiosity awake. They develop activities encouraging them to build knowledge through practices, projects and even life purposes. The Curricular Base for Innovation Culture: a methodology fostering student's development. Nave à Vela (NAV) respects the needs of each school and its particularities. For this reason, it developed an adaptable methodology to fit each school's needs: the Curricular Base for a Culture of Innovation. Designed for kindergarten, elementary school and high school students, it promotes maker learning, in which the student learns by building toys and prototypes and authoring projects. In this process, he starts to have a more exploratory relationship with knowledge and, thus, develops his autonomy. By becoming...
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Critical Making awarded at Bali FabFest

Critical Making awarded at Bali FabFest

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
Picture by saadcaffeine During October's first quarter, FabFest Bali gathered experts and enthusiasts at Jimbaran Hub for ten days of inspiring activities and new connections at the premier conference for people-centred digital transformation. Representing the Critical Making project, former GIG Executive Board Member Regina Sipos explained: "How Critical Makers Propose Alternative Futures". The article, built upon the research conducted by consortium partners on the Critical Making project, explores how Making can be more gender-inclusive and support education and open-source hardware projects.  The Fab Fest team has unanimously chosen the Critical Making contribution as the best paper 🥇 presented at the sessions and hosted an extended conversation of about half an hour on the FabTV prime show. You can check Regina's research paper highlight session on their YouTube channel:  (starting at minute 27 but make sure to watch the previous discussion, too!). https://youtu.be/oqi8HB2LeUo?t=1650 In the video, Peter Troxler and Cindy Kohtala asked some critical questions, which were highly favourable and encouraging. Congrats to the whole Critical Making Consortium partners and all our fantastic co-researchers! 🇪🇺 The...
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