Afrimakers, a project by Stefania Druga the Berlin-based-HacKidemia founder, a Singularity University Education fellow and a former Google employee, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $50,000 in a move to empower makers in Africa.
Just launched,Afrimakers seeks to empower makers in Africa to develop sustainable projects to solve local challenges and create an exchange of best practices between locals.
According to their campaign page, “Afrimakers is an initiative that wants to enable African makers to use digital fabrication for solving local challenges like access to clean water, energy, information. The idea is to plant the seed of local change through social entrepreneurship, digital fabrication and regional collaboration.”
Druga and her friends said they want to kickstart maker workshops focused in hubs in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Egypt. if the campaign goes well, the team say each of the seven hubs selected will receive a HacKidemia maker box of tools and will recruit a local team to be trained by them to organize and to run hands-on workshops in local private and public schools.
Then twith Maker fellowships, members of each team will go and train other hubs and makers in the region and nearby countries.
The HacKidemia Maker Box has a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino, a Microscope, a Makey-Makey and otehr tools like sensors, lights, cables, batteries, bread boards, conductive thread for wearables projects and crafts, a soldering Iron and solder, tools pliers, scissors and alligator clips.
The aim of the HacKidemia Afrimakers campaign is draw interest from grassroot teams to start maker projects to slove their community problems. The initiative will also train seven teams of mentors in seven hubs who will also go out and train others especially in local schools.The team earlier trained 50 mentors in Nigeria, who in turn trained 400 children in two weeks and made partnerships with ten local schools within a month of their initial training.
The team sees the Afrimakers campaign as a great learning opportunity for those to be involved. It will also solve local problems, create makers, create jobs and income for the participants and build a culture of makers in Kids. Because the project is affordable, it can be replicated allover thus creating maker workshops around the continent.
The berlin-based team need the money to begin this trip around Africa and enable makers to kickstart their sustainable and meaningful projects. They promise that 70% of the funds will be spend on materials and fellowships for local makers, 20% will cover their travel costs and 10% will be used for the book production and printing and for production of the other perks (t-shirts, bags, shoes) but f they exceed their funding goal they will be able to create more hubs in other African countries.
The initiative, is successful might closely work with Africa’s MakerFaire and hardware hubs across the continent such as Gearbox among others.
