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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Interview with Gertrude Goh from the Africa Makerspaces Network

Interview with Gertrude Goh from the Africa Makerspaces Network

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
The Africa Makerspace Network seeks to harmonize all makerspaces under one umbrella for growth and sustainable development in Africa. They achieve this by researching and contacting makerspaces in Africa, building makers' businesses, technical and entrepreneurial capacity, and enhancing prototype-to-product development and manufacturing. In this interview while in Berlin, Gertrude Gosh explains the Africa Makerspace Network and her work with Kumasi Hive in Ghana. https://youtu.be/_MhbhGWfkyo die Erstellung dieses Blogs Post  von der Stiftung Nord-Süd-Brücken mit finanzieller Unterstützung des BMZ Gefördert ...
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Please, Make things that Make sense!

Please, Make things that Make sense!

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
We are inviting makers & innovators globally to take part in the journey toward shaping a sustainable future of making.  Critical Making mentoring programme takes a deep dive into its principles:  Make Things That Make Sense: Create products and solutions that solve fundamental, real-world problems. Share How You Make: Develop guidelines that provide a framework for openly documenting everything about the project's making. Include Ecosystem Services: Aim to give back more than you take from the environment and include accounting practices that value natural resources. Integrate Local Knowledge: Build from within the community by working with local methods, materials and traditional resources. Build for Continuity: Design for the present and future; build social capacity, & aim for financial self-sufficiency.  Powering Inclusion and Openness. Critical Making adds scientific insights into the potential of the maker movement. Socially responsible making can show how global maker communities can offer new opportunities. Opportunities for young talents of all genders to contribute to an open society via open source innovation. You can learn more about...
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Olabi innovation hub promotes a toolkit to encourage diversity in companies.

Olabi innovation hub promotes a toolkit to encourage diversity in companies.

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
The digital toolkit consists of an ebook, a podcast series, and a video manifesto aiming to clarify concepts and encourage companies to create environments of diversity in the workplace, supporting more women, LGBTQIAP+, black, indigenous and people with disability in their frames.It contains tips and guidelines on creating policies for welcoming and retaining people in the teams and the experiences and challenges of companies that experienced transformations in the workplace. Diversity is a theme that occupies more space in publicity, politicians and corporate addresses, classrooms, and journalistic guidelines each time. But how do you take real action? How do we convert themes to working policies? Include, insert and accept the broad and diverse range of people who coexist in the society, with respect and opening to welcome ideas, perspectives, and many different cultures can not be a desire but a requirement. However, it presupposes paradigms overturns not always straightforward incorporated. Olabi has extensive experience in consulting and actions to create more inclusive environments in...
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MboaLab inaugurates its “Bio Innovation Hub”

MboaLab inaugurates its “Bio Innovation Hub”

By Ricardo Ruiz Comment Closed
MboaLab committed to educating, transforming and positively impacting the lives of the Cameroonian people through its DIY lab. Last February, Mboalab, in partnership with the University of Cambridge, inaugurated its "Bio-Innovation Hub". This Hub is a shared biotechnology laboratory made available to researchers and students and is already undoubtedly contributing to the democratisation of biotechnology in Africa.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD5m_UQrw8A Founded in 2018, with the aim to tackle the lack of biology laboratory equipment and reagents; MboaLab started bridging the gap in access to scientific equipment, particularly in Cameroon. This is the seed of what became the DIY biotechnology lab, MboaLab, in 2018 Biomakers at Mboa Bio Innovation Hub DIY biotechnology labs believe that science shouldn't be reserved for those who are formally qualified scientists and that anyone and everyone should be able to dabble in science. Therefore, in partnership with local universities, MboaLab organises and runs internship and training programs to equip growing talents in molecular biology, synthetic biology, engineering, and biotechnology. As a result, about 50...
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