The Global Digital Development Forum is an international event convening technologists, researchers, donors and practitioners to advance international development. It takes place in Washington DC and engages over 3,000 participants.
Manufacturing and hardware is rarely discussed, but our Alliance Chair Andrew Lamb attended and presented the work of Internet of Production Alliance members and launched the Scaling Distributed Manufacturing in the Global South report.
Full text:
Thank you for having me.
The Next Industrial ‘Devolution’: manufacturing is devolving.
It is leaving the cities and the industrial estates – and China – and it is spreading to more and more places. And it is coming to avillage, to a shop, to a slum, to a refugee camp near you.
It's enabled by the Internet and by low-cost computers and digital fabrication machines. It is enabled by improved access to education around the world. And to knowledge shared openly and to know-how being shared openly.
It's enabled by the entrepreneurial spirit of pioneers across the Global South wanting to use the latest technology to improve their lives and their communities.
Manufacturing is becoming less centralised and more distributed and more accessible.
And mass production is being complemented by what Gandhi called ‘production by the masses’. But we aren't just talking about spinning cotton anymore.
We're talking about making certified medical devices. We're talking about manufacturing microprocessors, buckets and recycled plastic building blocks. We're talking about manufacturing enzymes and emergency supplies.
It's spreading faster now because of open-source software and because of the rise of open-source hardware and the adoption of open standards for manufacturing across networks.
These pioneers of distributed manufacturing were last yearthe focus of a study by Anna Sera Lowe, Regina Sipos,Victoria Wenzelmann and Felipe Fonseco for UK Aid and the FCDO's Frontier Technology Hub – called ‘Scaling Distributed Manufacturing in the Global South’.
They found barriers to progress. The research showed that in every local digital manufacturers' case that they looked at in the Global South, they were all internalising costs that in other countries and in other industries could be provided at the ecosystem level.
So their costs are higher and their sales are lower and slower than they should be.
But then there was the Covid-19 pandemic.
These pioneers – and the maker movement in general –responded where global supply chains failed, making tens of millions of items of PPE in places that were otherwise very hard to reach.
There was a burst of investment into massive numbers of small manufacturers – and the ecosystems that supported them – including investments by UKAid/FCDO, but mainly by communities themselves. And we saw this in the United States as well and the UK.
What is needed now is for that investment, and interest, to be rediscovered and redoubled.
Because if we as a sector can help bring together the Next Industrial Devolution to places left behind by globalisation – and if we can enable true localisation and resilience – in this new ‘Internet of Production’ then:
Thank you.
