Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “National Maker Faire: Tackling the Ebola Challenge”.
I’M Dale Dougherty and we’re here at the National Maker Faire campus of you DC and I have Kate gauges an advisor the u.s. global development lab at USAID all right. That is correct. It’S good to see. Uk we’ve seen a lot of Maker, Faires and, and your your focus really is in at least one of your projects is looking at the maker movement in developing countries and and and really kind of almost a mixing back and forth between. What’S going on here in the US and in countries like africa, so I mean just tell me a little bit about that: yeah we’ve! Basically, two things: one is trying to get the maker movement here in the states and across the world to focus on global challenges.
Like global health and agriculture, clean water and the other one is to empower local makers in their communities to come up with solutions for the problems they have in their own world. So we look at in creating spaces access to tools and then also convening makers in the developing and in the in DC and across the United States to solve global problems. So a pretty good example that was the Ebola challenge it was.
We brought we threw a couple different workshops with engineers makers, designers and global health experts to tackle issues like the protective equipment that the healthcare workers had to use across West Africa. During the Ebola crisis and various other issues, we ended up actually redesigning the protective equipment down from about 15 individual pieces to one piece of protective equipment that could be put on and off in less than five minutes. Now I saw a talk by Jill Andrews the other day, who is one of the contributors there she’s fantastic she’s, a wedding dress designer out of Baltimore. She went to the Johns Hopkins workshop that we helped support and she looked at the problem and she said I can make a wedding dress.
I can help solve this problem. She joined the team, she was a key part of it and they won the grand challenge that we put out there to fight Ebola. I love it.
She said I’m a maker. I could make anything. I could make it bugs when i get out of fabric and then later she said: if he could build a bra, you could build a bridge. So she just erased all the distinction between engineering and – and you know, textiles and everything was. She was wonderful, yeah.
We’Re really proud of that work and we’re already seeing the impact it across West Africa and for future outbreaks. So tell me about efforts to kind of seed some of this locally in places like Africa yeah. We work really closely with a couple different groups, including some labs out of MIT, that do workshops in places like Tanzania, Uganda across Kenya, to show the local people that they can be builders and makers and creators in their own communities. A great example is a guy out of Tanzania who’s started doing bicycle-powered, mekia mechanics he’s done, bicycle-powered, corn, shuckers and blenders for drinks.
He started companies within his own community, all based on local materials, seeing what they have around and how they can repurpose it for their own. Now, if people want more information, where could they get it online, USAID, govt, usa.gov? Okay, great! Thank You, Kate! .