In the Sub-Saharan African region, open source and maker communities have been thriving over the past decade. This geographical space refers to the region of Africa that lies south of the Sahara Desert, encompassing various areas including central Africa, East Africa, Southern Africa and West Africa.
In countries like Nigeria, there are different movements that support the development and implementation of hardware. Some of these include CoMakers Africa, Hardware Nigeria Community, Botsgeek Tech hub, Nithub Tech Innovation hub, Grassroot Makershub, Clintonel innovation center, Vilsquare Makers hub, amongst others
In recent years there has also been a huge push for hardware specific to health and medical care. This kind of work which has been christened in a framework known as open healthware can also be found among makers in the region.
The Hardware Nigeria Community has the matra of building a sustainable hardware ecosystem in Lagos, Nigeria while bringing together members from across the country and those in diaspora. It is a non-profit association of inventors, designers, engineers, and makerspaces focused on building a world-class hardware ecosystem within the country. It also works to support government policies and industrial frameworks to foster growth and create a favourable environment for innovation. So far, the community states that it has supported over 10 fabrication labs, trained over 1,000 innovators, and currently has over 300 members.
The community is active both on Facebook and Whatsapp,connecting through these platforms when in-person gathering isn’t possible and to get feedback on projects from each other.
There is also the Vilsquare Maker Hub, a community of innovators working to build a more inclusive, sustainable society that serves everyone.
The hub organized Hackathons within the country from 2018 to 2019. These events brought together skilled designers in fashion, software, hardware electronics, creative art, and graphics to solve some of the country’s toughest problems. The community successfully brought together a diverse group of dispersed individuals into a cohesive and self-organized entity to achieve some of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and promote tolerance for a diverse group of young people.
Some of the projects built during these hackathons include:
i. Heart rate Monitor for Pregnant Women
ii. Wearable Back-vibration Massage
iii. Wearable Medical Information Logger for Travellers
iv. Wearable Cigarette smoke sensor to reduce passive smoking
All these projects are available as open-source projects for anyone to be able to build themselves, or find new ways to utilize the hardware.
Open source hardware is popular and necessary in the Sub-Saharan African region because it gives people the freedom to control their technology while sharing knowledge and encouraging commerce through the open exchange of designs. As defined by OSHWA, Open Source Hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make and sell the design or hardware based on that design.
Open source hardware is especially important because of financial and access restraints in the region. Through open source, expensive medical devices can be prototyped rapidly and effectively. Getting these devices to the community as quickly as possible is often the main priority as we deal with a rapidly changing landscape of care. With the use of open source hardware and healthware, the maker community is able to design innovations with local tools and materials to solve local problems, provide new sources of employment, and share the maker culture with a larger range of people. Bringing more healthcare professionals into the healthware movement allows for a greater understanding of what kind of devices are needed.
This also creates the opportunity for the community to be involved in the production of these designs, leading to more widespread adoption within the region and beyond, and opening up opportunities to share knowledge with other regions.
Open Healthware will help democratize the tools needed for the development of open-source medical devices. Adopting this framework will help overcome resource limitations, enabling research labs and individuals to design and replicate medical devices at an affordable cost. With Open Healthware, communities gain the power to customize designs to their specific needs, fostering the development of technical expertise in building open healthware. There is also a need to educate people about what the Open Healthware movement represents—its inherent benefits and the thriving community of individuals building open healthware.
