[MUSIC] So in this video, we are chatting with William Hoyle who is the CEO of TechforTrade, a UK-based nonprofit. That whose mission is to enable entrepreneurs or people who are like-minded to find solutions to their problems, leveraging technology. So join us for a chat with him on how 3D printing can be leveraged for development in the global south, as he calls it. So TechforTrade really I guess, builds on my kind of interest in the role that technology can play in terms of improving social outcomes for people. And the vision really, behind TechforTrade is that we see ourselves working towards a time when technology innovation re-enables full and fair payment for work and trade. In a way that will lift, hopefully millions of the world's out of poverty, so very much for us technology is at the heart of what we do. And it's central to our idea that, technology is an enabler. That provides the opportunity to create systemic changes in the traditional ways in which a systemic changes that are pro-poor in the sense that they benefit the poorest in the society not only those at the top of the value chain. [SOUND] I was fortunate enough to be able to persuade my board to allow me to run a competition at the 3D4D Challenge. Which really was simply to try and find groundbreaking opportunities that could have a transformational impact on the lives of some of the poorest people in the world. And then applying 3D printing technology at the center of those transformational ideas and that was the competition that is what we launched. I will be really honest with you, when we launched the competition I had no idea whether we would receive even five applications and to that end. I did spend about three months doing a bit of a roadshow, visiting universities in Kenya, in South Africa, in Chennai in India, maker spaces in Romania, a trip to Brooklyn. To try and plant the seed of the idea of the competition the result, as you know, was we received 80 entries from across the world, from Chile, to Senegal, to the Gaza Strip. A wide range of ideas, many of which we dismissed as being too fanciful. Many of which have gone on to be some of the leading players in the Treaty printing industry, so it just shows we don't always back Windows. And we very quickly found through the news that spread around the competition that we were moving closer and closer to the center of an emerging sort of spiders web of people who shared a similar vision. When the competition ran, I was amazed by the level of interest. You may recall that the competition received a full page of coverage in the economist. We were on the BBC and on NBC, and it seemed that the idea that the technology might have a part to play In [INAUDIBLE] relief, really resonated with a wide community. Not only of technically minded people, but those people that were generally interested in the enabling power of technology for development. So, I think that was Was really where we started that really was the trigger for the work that we're now involved in. And George, to come back to your question about what did we see and what do we see in the technology? Well, if you think about the context of the developing world, if you think about. What I've described earlier on, poor infrastructure. If you think about growing populations that are hungry to consume, to embrace new technology. A growing population of young people in education that need to get access to educational tools. The challenges of carrying stock in inventory when you're operating at the base of the pyramid, intermittent energy supplies. When you think about the characteristics of 3D printing, it's almost perfectly suited to tackling some of those issues. For me, that was the most fundamental revelation. That here is a technology that is low energy, it's additive rather than subtractive. It reduces carrying costs for inventory machines can be powered using solar technology. It has all those characteristics, and yet nobody seemed to be exploring the potential. Manufacturing Today is a product of the Industrial Revolution, our means of production and our division of labor model. The way in which we've broken down, manufactured an assembly into many low skilled steps are all products of the Industrial Revolution. And they fundamentally influenced how we think about manufacturing and yet when you look at 3D printing technology. We look at the ecosystem, the power of bringing together the internet, mobile phone, design And software and the hardware. You're really bringing back all of those things together to put the power to invent, create, and distribute in the hands of one person. That's an enormously exciting possibility. I think the other thing for me is we talk a lot about two words, development and positate. And actually, when you pries open what we mean by development, and what we mean by politic. I honestly believe that our traditional view of development, is what we in the global north do for people in the global south. It's the transfer of knowledge, know how, power, advice, however you want to look at it. And yet, 3D printing is a democratizing technology, it's an enabling technology that enables from the bottom up. So it changes the nature of that development discourse and when we talk about poverty, obviously, often we measure poverty in terms of ability to consume. And we measure consumption, often, in terms of our perception of consumption, the products we would consume or we would need to consume. And of course, if you've ever visited a farmer's house in Sub-Saharan Africa, you will know that poverty in terms of consumption It's framed by the situation of the individual. Of what we might discount as being, if you like unfit for consumption, could be enormously beneficial for somebody that has very little. So, I think those tenants for me are really important when one considers the role that 3D printing can play, I think uncertainty often is a factor of lack of control. A very current example of that is the situation in Tanzania, a place where we're working at the moment, where there are literally thousands of people who make a living from collecting waste, plastic waste. And with the fall in the global oil price the market for recycled plastic has virtually disappeared. The two largest recycling businesses in Dar es Salaam have closed. So you have a market there that's defined by the collection of waste for export, mostly to China for reprocessing. And yet the potential to relieve poverty and reduce uncertainty by looking at waste to value opportunities that turn waste into products is enormous. You can reduce uncertainty by bringing more control into the hands of those people that need it. There is a project which is based in Malawi, a project being run by the University of Galway, where 3D printing technology is being used to enable a redesign of agricultural tools used by women smallholder farmers. The role that 3D technology plays is that it enables participatory design approaches that encourage women to think about how improvements in tool design would improve peak time tool usage. It enables those approaches to be translated into rapid prototyping so that the women involved can very quickly see how their design improvements turn into a prototype that they can play with and test before the actual tools are produced. More often than not, not using 3D printing technology. The technology itself enables that rapid prototyping which very quickly brings to life the ideas that the farmers have. So I think that's, for me, a really smart way of using The technology. The other example that I would cite is the work that's being done with enable to create the prosthetic hand, the customized prosthetic hand. We're just testing some of their designs at the moment in Nairobi. But I think what they've created is a really, really useful toolkit that can be adapted in a local context and rapidly deploy at very low cost. For many people in developing countries, a prosthetic hand for example, often in is something they simply cannot obtain. As an aside, one of the things that came after the 3D footage challenge was an amazing technology. That has developed a technique for creating soft tissues prostheses from a silicon gel, on to which can be printed the pigmentation of the skin. Now facial prosthetics are a whole different area and in most developing countries, the technology simply does not exist. To provide all but the most wealthy with any form of facial prosthesis. So that is a truly transformational approach which reduces the cost of facial prosthetics to a few hundred dollars. Our start point really is the learning from the competition. And from the competition back in 2012 it was clear that we needed to think about the development of 3D printing technology in the ecosystem as a kind of journey. It feels to me that we are today where we were with the Internet in the 1990s. It's very difficult to look at an FDM machine printing PLA and ABS, and say, well that's where the state of the industry. So, we're on a journey, and I think there are a few people that could predict where that journey will take us but I think there are more and more people that believe. That 3D printing technology could be as transformational in the context of development as the mobile phone. So the big question for me is if we believe that that transformational potential is there how do we make sure that that journey is an inclusive journey. So that we don't see the developing economies of this world miss out on this next industrial revolution in the way they perhaps missed out on the last. And when you consider what the barriers are to inclusive adoption, It sort of gives some clues, as to where I think we need to apply our focus. So we believe that there are four areas that we think we need to focus on, in terms of insuring that those areas to inclusion are minimized. We call them the four e's, and they are equipment which is obvious. Access to the machines, the materials that it needed to make this technology affordable and accessible. The second really then is education. How do we make sure that from school level upwards, the ability to embrace and use these emerging technologies is present in the curriculum. Young people gain the confidence and experience to understand the possibility that the technology creates. The third is, what we call, enabling innovation. By that we mean that as this technology starts to disrupt traditional supply chains, new value models will be created and though the value that's created, we believe. Should be distributed in such a way that is much of that value as possible is able to be captured In the countries in which we're working. So the analogy I always use is, if you could imagine that a company like FedEx, some years from now decides that rather than shipping the part from a Land Rover from one part of the globe to another. It simply transfers the digital file to a small manufacturing hub in a place like Mombasa. The way in which that new value chain distributes the value can be influenced by the capability of the actors on the ground to meet the needs of that industry. So we need to make sure that those actors are prepared for those changes and those innovation models. And then the fourth is really about enabling local entrepreneurship. I really believe that there's an emerging mechatronics market in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Where you've got hundreds of millions of consumers that are able to spend small amounts of money on products designed for their market. You may have read about a product called Brick designed by an organization called. It's one of the first modems, come routers, come cache storage devices designed for a base of the pyramid market. I believe you'll see more of those. But to enable that development, you need entrepreneurs to be able to embrace technologies like 3D printing to create prototypes for us, the enabling components. And they come together for us in this concept that we call the Digital Blacksmith. So our digital blacksmith is a maker business of the future. A business that's capable of supporting local entrepreneurs, developing value added products for local markets. Building machines for users, for schools, supporting curriculum development, and creatively enabling environment. For the use of the technology. So we believe that this concept of the digital backsmith is the solid cornerstone of how we want to see 3D printing and indeed other small sky or digital fabrication technologies enlarged. These are commercial businesses that respond to the needs, we're not defining the needs, the communities and defining the needs, but defining the needs of the local market. So we have two business at the moment that we're supporting, one in Nairobi and another in Dar es Salaam. Both of these businesses are owned by young engineering graduates from local universities. Would be entrepreneurs that see the potential for this technology. We're supporting them with small amounts of seed funding, technical advice and know-how, and business mentoring and support. We've developed a 3D printer called Retread, which these businesses are building. We starting to produce filament from locally recycled plastic, which these businesses can use. And we're working on the creation of small portfolio of high value products. The first of which will be a research microscope, which these businesses will make for sale in their local markets. By working with these businesses we're creating what we call a replication handbook. A model that will inform us on how we will replicate these businesses. Perhaps in the form of a franchise to enable the idea to be recreated by other entrepreneurs in other markets. Later this year we'll be developing a third venture in garner where we will test our application model and refine it. By the end of this year we aim to have a full business in play using our application model and going into next year. We plan to work on scaling up that franchise model and looking at how we grow it and scale it further. Alongside that, as I say, we'll be working on the product portfolio beyond the microscope. We'd like to broaden the product range. We would love to work with innovators and idea creators who have ideas for other high value products that could be of utility in developing countries. We would love to work with people who are interested in taking our 3D printer design forward It's an open source design, it's available online. And so over the course of next year, we will look to grum out that replication model for our digital blacksmiths, and seek wider corporation with the community. You need to broaden the range of materials the machines can print with. The other area I would mention is educational curriculum. I suspect that many of your burners will have ideas about innovative ways in which 3D printing can be embedded into the curriculum. It can't be adjacent to the curriculum, it needs to be central to the curriculum, so we are open to any ideas that people who watch this film have. And who knows, maybe next year we could run a mini 3D [INAUDIBLE] challenge to find the next transformational product for development that could come out of this community. I would love that to happen. [MUSIC]
