Nairobi's Open Space for Design and Rapid Prototyping

Gearbox is a 20,000 sq. ft. makerspace in Nairobi, providing local innovators with the access to space, tools, knowledge, skills, and support they need to build high-impact businesses that create jobs and serve the local needs. We are building a model for impact-oriented makerspaces in emerging markets.

Across Africa, there is a vibrant culture of designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs creating products designed to improve people’s lives. This strong foundation for widespread innovation exists, but is highly constrained by a lack of skills training and poor access to quality tools and materials. As a result, many manufactured products in the Kenyan market are not designed locally, and fail to meet local needs. The local, formal-sector manufacturing culture tends to stifle innovation through jealously guarded trade secrets and closed doors, and broadly lacks the capacity to design and make locally relevant products at world-class quality standards, particularly amongst small and medium enterprises. Locally trained designers, engineers, technicians, and artisans typically lack outlets for creative growth and rewarding careers, and the best local organizations and talent are forced to design and develop abroad, increasing costs and time to market and spurring brain drain.

Gearbox is building a supportive ecosystem for hardware entrepreneurs, creating a pipeline of skilled workers and high-impact businesses by removing the key constraints to developing innovative hardware products in Kenya. This includes a 20,000 sq. ft. prototyping facility, granting SMEs, startups, and entrepreneurs access to tools that would typically be beyond their reach. The space features co-location with local and international manufacturing companies, creating a culture of openness and collaboration and exposing newly trained engineers and entrepreneurs to global opportunities. Our learning center brings cutting edge knowledge of design and fabrication techniques consistent with Industry 4.0 to the local community, while incubation, investment, and business development partnerships help entrepreneurs bring new products to market quickly and efficiently. In addition to these core services, Gearbox Contracting gives many of our members their first exposure to the world of professional manufacturing, while our work with the Gearbox Foundation will build a replicable model for supporting hardware entrepreneurship in developing countries.

Existing platforms for skills training and workforce development in Kenya are often under-resourced and unresponsive to industry’s needs, resulting in a substantial skills gap where jobs go unfilled despite high levels of unemployment. Local youth have few avenues available to them to learn either hard skills in design and fabrication using new tools and technologies, or the soft skills of professionalism and project management that can make them sought after employees. 

The founding consortium behind Gearbox has more than 30 years collective experience building innovative hardware products in Africa. The Executive Director spent over 15 years supporting young innovators at the University of Nairobi Fab Lab and Science and Technology Park, and serves on the boards of many key institutions in workforce development, including the National Industrial Training Authority. Through this experience, we have seen firsthand the barriers that prevent local youth from succeeding in the workforce. In our pilot phase, we helped over 100 community members develop skills in design and fabrication, get hired by local companies, or launch their own startups.

Gearbox has two levels of beneficiaries. The first includes our members, who use the facilities to make things they would not otherwise have the ability or tools to make; our tenants, who enjoy a co-located community of support; our trainees, who take classes in design, fabrication, and other skills; and our clients, who contract Gearbox and our community to design and prototype innovative solutions to pressing engineering problems. The second includes the customers that our members, tenants, trainees, and clients serve with higher quality, locally designed products and services, e.g. cashless payment systems for water dispensing in slum communities.

Track membership and contracting sales, class registrations, and rental applications through point of sale system - 100 community members served

Track new product creation by community members through interviews and surveys - 10 innovative products prototyped

Track new company registrations by community members through interviews and surveys - Five new companies launched

No facility similar to Gearbox exists in Kenya, or indeed in most of sub-Saharan Africa. There are large-scale facilities in Nairobi – owned by private manufacturing companies – that have advanced prototyping and low-volume manufacturing equipment, but they are not open to the public. There are innovation spaces that are open to the public, but are much smaller scale (e.g. the University of Nairobi Fab Lab) or focus on software development (the iHub). Gearbox is the first organization of its kind providing skills training and access to equipment in a facility relevant to local industry, open to anyone (trained engineer or non-engineer), and at scale.

The Maker Movement is a movement of people, not things. By making many of the newest technologies in design and fabrication (things) available to our community, we are empowering people to learn the skills they need to build solutions to problems they face every day. Innovative solutions to Kenya’s most pressing challenges – clean water, quality healthcare, affordable housing, or reliable energy – will not be designed in San Francisco or Shenzhen. By supporting local innovators to launch businesses solving these problems, we help the world’s youngest population (60% under 25) become a demographic dividend and not a lost generation.

Gearbox was founded and built in Kenya, by Kenyans, and is dedicated to building programs that are available to all. Many of our training and outreach programs are conducted off-site: at technical schools and training centers for informal sector workers who may feel alienated by Gearbox’s more advanced facility, while our space is being designed and built to give Kenya’s best and brightest young minds opportunities to explore their creativity and advance their careers without having to leave the country. We work with partners to provide sponsorships and offset our costs for those unable to afford a membership.

We founded Gearbox with the goal of being 100% self-sustainable through earned revenue. Our revenue streams include membership sales, training and class fees, rent from co-location and subletting, and contract design, prototyping, and project management services.

Our sustainability model is based on reaching the capacity to serve ~150 members, ~200 trainees, and three high-value ($5,000 USD) contracting jobs per month, as well as renting out ~80% of our available co-location spaces. Having just moved into our new 20,000 sq. ft. facility in March of 2017, we hope to reach this capacity within the next two years, however this will require substantial investment in our equipment and facilities.

We have seen overwhelming demand for high-quality engineering services in Kenya, however, our ability to meet that demand, either by training our community and connecting them with these opportunities or by providing contract services directly through our staff, has been limited by the scope of our facilities. During our pilot phase, we were in a 2,500 sq. ft. facility that was unable to accommodate large projects or more than 20 members. We now have a 20,000 sq. ft. facility in a prime location, but we need to make substantial investments in our equipment to reach our sustainability targets.

We started our organisation through donor funding and managed to raise significantly less than we knew we needed to do all that is necessary to make new high impact manufacturing businesses possible through non-traditional players. We are now bootstrapping Gearbox and while we're quite pleased by what is unfolding, we still need skilled people from around the world to come in and train and mentor our members, and organisations to donate more funds or used equipment. Network is vital for us. That's how we'd use your grant and network to build. 

Gearbox Foundation

Lemelson Foundation

Autodesk Foundation

Silicon Valley Community Foundation

GE East Africa

Philips Foundation

KPMG

ASME

The Fab Foundation

Global Innovation Gathering

BRCK

iHub

Ushahidi

We have no competitors and welcome all collaborations.