Afrimakers is fully funded!

Regular updates will be published here and here

Because of logistical reasons not all the funds could be processed through the campaign donation system but we know that thanks to your support we will be able to:

• train more than 100 mentors in 10 hubs (we got to all the seven hubs and thanks to the extra-funds raised with your help we will be able to go also to Rwanda, Botswana and Johannesburg. )
• organize STEM hands-on workshops for more than 1000 children in 10 countries. 
• give 30 mentors fellowships (each worth 500$)
• give 10 maker boxes to all the 10 hubs (each worth 1500$)

Thank you very much for being part of this adventure and supporting our project! We knew it was difficult to make a campaign which is not product focused but has as a main goal to empower a global community of makers. You choose to back an ambitious and meaningful project and for that we are truly grateful. 

We will keep on sending you updates from our journey and ask for your opinion, ideas and advices. As a thank you we also created a banner that you can use to show you helped us make Afrimakers happen. 

Download here: http://bit.ly/1d9c58J

Social Media:

• Facebook page:https://www.facebook.com/afrimakers
  
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/afrimakers
  
• Email: afrimakers@hackidemia.com
  
• Newsletter: http://bit.ly/10tH2iq
  

What is Afrimakers?

Afrimakers is an initiative that wants to enable African makers to use local know-how and hands-on prototyping 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.

We want to kickstart maker workshops focused on local challenges in 7 hubs around Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt).

How does it work?

Take a look at our first HacKIDemia workshops in Nigeria:

Each  of the seven hubs will receive a HacKidemia maker box of tools and will recruit a local team to be trained by us to organize and to run hands-on workshops in local private and public schools. Maker fellowships will be offered for members of each team to go and train other hubs and makers in the region and near countries.

The HacKidemia Maker Box contains all the materials and tools necessary for the hands-on workshops in schools.

What’s in the box?

• A Raspberry Pi - the cheapest computer that can fit in a pocket and can be used almost with any type of screen

• 4 Arduinos - a controller that could be programmed to record data from any type of sensor (air pollution, humidity, temperature, different types of gasses) or to control any sort of engine, ventilators, lights remotely

 

• 2 Makey-Makeys - a board that allows you to control and connect to the computer any object that conducts electricity ( fruits, metal bands, liquids).                       

       

• an RFID starter kit
• a Soldering kit useful for up-cycling and building electronics 
• a Lily Pad kit for making wearable projects  

          

• 5 Humidity and Temperature sensors        
• 2 Pulse sensors
• a Color detector sensor
• a Carbon Monoxide sensor                                     

                           

• 5 bread boards
• a Camera module
• tons of tools like LEDs, cables, batteries, conductive thread for wearables projects and crafts, copper tape, a soldering Iron and solder, tools pliers, scissors and alligator clips

The maker box comes with a many learning activities curated and tested by HacKIDemia in workshops with young people around the world

• Example learning activity- Paper - circuit workshop to make a box 

Perks

Afrimaker Map

We will craft a map of Africa with all makers participating in the project in the different regions, add tips and stories along the way and share the final artifact with you as a high quality image

Maker passport

We were inspired by the Hacker passport created by Mitch Altman and we decided  to create a maker passport in order to encourage all the mentors to share and acquire new skills. Claim your maker passport here and become a global citizen like us! (you will receive a passport printable version together with editing files so you can adapt it to your own ideas).

Skills Stamps (3d model)

Receive a 3d model of a robot stamp that you can use to for your maker passport once you learned more about Robotics or Electronics. (more stamps to follow) 

Claim your first maker stamps here and start collecting knowledge! 

Afrimakers T-shirt

How about wearing this next time y're making something?

Get one of the limited edition Afrimakers T-Shirts. This shirt comes in three colors (blue, grey and green) and shows the Afrimaker logo. (Please email us your color and size to afrimakers@hackidemia.com with the word "T-shirt" in tittle)

Claim your T-shirt here and dream big every time you wear it!

Afrimakers Book

Afrimakers journey is all about the local makers, capturing their stories and projects and inspiring everyone else to get involved. Receive a hard-copy of the book that captures all stories, projects and challenges from our trip in these 7 African countries. The book will be signed by all the makers and supporters that were involved in this project

Claim your hard-copy here and help us capture all the inspiring stories!

Maker Fellowships

If you want to be more involved, you can personally sponsor a Maker Fellowship that allows a trained mentor to travel to other hubs in order to share best practices and develop the regional Afrimakers network. You will be put in contact with the maker you helped and y'll be able to stay in touch with him or her and get regular updates on their projects progress and impact.

 

Maker box - Pledge one , Give one 

Receive a HacKIDemia Maker box for your school or community to organize workshops and hack in your own environment. A second box will be given to the community of your choice. The box comes with very well documented projects and learning activities and with access to our project collection online. 

If you want to have this for you children at home consider how much the young makers in Africa would enjoy it as well and chose to share the opportunity here.

Maker hubs in Africa

Enable the team to visit a new hub in Africa and train local staff to use and create extremely affordable technology for solving local challenges. You can suggest the hub and one of the challenges the local team will work on. This would allow them to organize regular workshops for young people and to have a much better equipped space. 

2 Hubs were already sponsored, help us fund all the hubs here. 

Other Ways You Can Help

If the perks are not your thing, but you still want to support our cause - here are some ways to do that:

Donate miles so we can reduce our travel costs (if you can help please write to us to afrimakers@hackidemia.com with the word "Miles" in title and the name of your flights company and we will send you the link for donation) 

Donate time, you could either help us with preparing the pledges, or mentor the local makers over internet (write to us to afrimakers@hackidemia.com with the word "Time" in title) 

Suggest local or global funders and partners (write to us to afrimakers@hackidemia.com with the word "Partners" in title) 

Get the word out! share our campaign link in your circles, groups, online, offline and tell people about our project around the world. 

How will we use the funds

In order to pursue with this trip around Africa and enable makers to kickstart their sustainable and meaningful projects we need your help:

• 70% of the funds will be spend on materials and fellowships for local makers We want to equip each hub with two maker boxes and train at least 5 mentors. This is a good number for an initial spark and to assure that the community grows organically after our kick-off. We estimate that each mentor can run 3 workshops with 30 kids per day which would result in 800 kids trained during our time on site.
• 20% will cover our travel costsWe will try to cover all the flights with miles donations so you can donate those tooor host us in your city in order to help reduce these costs.
• 10% will be used for the perks We will use this part of the funding to produce and print the Afrimakers book, T-shirts and Maker Passport with stamps

If we reach our Goal of $50,000 we will

• work with 7 hubs in Africa and donate 14 Maker Kits

• train 40 mentors and provide them with Maker fellowships to visit other hubs to share best practices & grow the community

• conduct workshops with 800 kids per location 

We will  improve the  platforms of collaboration for the teams for the hubs and co-create all methodology, content and support. We will also continue remote community management and connect the teams from the hubs with regional opportunities of collaboration.

If we exceed our campaign goal, we are able to create more hubs and extend our campaign to other African countries.

See the full details on the project implementation, calendar of trainings, country projects, teams and partners on the ground.

What makes this A GREAT IDEA?

1. It’s a grass-roots project with big social impact

HacKidemia Afromakers campaign is a grassroots initiative co-created with local teams that expressed their interest in starting maker project with young participants for solving problems in their community. It will start small by training seven teams of mentors in seven hubs and it will grow organically as these mentors will be encouraged and facilitated to train other mentors and many children in local schools. In our previous experience in Nigeria a team of 50 mentors trained 400 children in two weeks and made partnerships with ten local schools within a month of their initial training. None of them had experience working with children or digital fabrication tools before the training but they were eager to learn.

2. It’s a simple strategy & model

Local teams receive the training and the tools they need to kickstart meaningful projects for young participants in schools and the opportunity to create their own job by running paid hands-on workshops in private schools which are willing to teach new technology and hands-on science and crafts to their students but cannot afford to train their staff or buy/make their own tools. This source of income will allow mentors to use the same materials for organizing and running free workshops in public schools where children cannot afford to pay for having access to these kind of projects and tools. The children get inspired by the new interactive and hands-on methodology but also by the fact that the mentors are young people from the same environment.

3. It’s sustainable on the long term

After creating the first series of trainings for local mentors and for children in schools, testing, enriching and adapting the learning activities from the Maker Box to the local needs. We estimate that other schools and hubs will be interested to be trained and get the boxes. The initial team from the seven hubs will be able to create and sell new boxes and charge for the training of trainers.

4. It takes place in 7 pro-active countries in Africa

At HacKidemia we try to build everything with a "pull" strategy and not "push". We work with people and teams that reach out to us and are motivated to work on meaningful projects for local communities. The reason why we choose to work with the hubs in Kenya, Tanzania,  South Africa, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Egypt it's because we met each of these teams personally. They are all proactive change-makers from these countries and they asked us to help them start projects with kids.

5. It's managed and owned locally

The seven countries have a rising network of entrepreneurs and we hope that our experience of working with kids will enable them to involve local communities from an early age and create a local ecosystem of pro-active problem solving.

6. It's done by the people for the people

Each mentor involved will bring and use his special skills but also have the opportunity to learn from all the other mentors from the global HacKidemia community as well as from the children he will be working with during the workshops. During our projects everyone learns all the time and we try to involve every member of the local community (children, students, parents, grandparents) and give them the opportunity to share their talent and skills and to learn from the others.

7. It is extremely affordable

The maker movement is becoming more and more popular but many people cannot build a maker space because the cost of a 3d printer, laser cutter, computers and all other materials is still very high. For allowing the people that need the most digital fabrication tools in their daily lives we need tools that are extremely affordable, easy to use for multiple and transferable projects and easy to fix with parts available locally.

HacKIDemia - More about What We Do

After working with more than 8000 children around the world in more than 25 countries and training local teams of 400 mentors, we were asked by several hubs in Africa to come and train them to run maker workshops with young people. As a result we started HacKIDemia Afrimakers in order to enable African makers to use digital fabrication for solving local challenges like access to clean water, energy and information. We also see this as a great learning opportunity for us and our team of mentors as we get the opportunity to work on real problems with little resources and in difficult environments. This context will allow us to take the portability of our workshops and labs to the next level and to improve our hands-on problem solving methodology.

Some workshop examples:

Mud battery workshop

Microscope upcycling workshop (transform old webcams into a microscopes)

Water quality workshop

Toys from trash workshop

Air quality workshop (change color of LED based on amount of gas recorded)

Microelectronics and soldering workshops

Programming and design workshops

Crafting and recycling workshops

Stories from the field

Ema(6 years old) learned how to solder and build a sound to light unit, Lena Coco (9 years old became a member of the Jury together with Vint Cerf (father of internet) for a Google big ideas competition, Emeka (12 years old) build his own electricity DC-AC convertor to better deal with electricity cuts. 

Explore all the stories here: www.hackidemia.com/blog/ 

The Core Team

Stefania

Stefania is the founder of HacKIDemia and graduated from an international Erasmus Mundus master of Media Engineering for Education (France, Spain, Portugal). In the summer of 2012 she was also the Education Teaching Fellow at Singularity University where she advised and coached 80 students from 36 countries. As a former Google employee Stef has experience in web search infrastructure and international open education programs. In 2011-2012 she created invention labs for kids in Paris and Cambodia. She can’t stop building and inventing things!

Lina

Lina recently got involved with HacKIDemia and set up the Afrimakers campaign because she loves making things happen. She was involved with the Institute of Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin and helped organize a crowdfunded festival in Croatia last summer. Lina has a background in IT and International Management and a passion for efficiency and smooth processes. Currently she is working for Google in Paris.

Jay

Jay is a HacKIDemia ambassador in Egypt and believes in trying out stuff to see what happens. Experimenting with Autonomy, and learning by doing. Previous experiments have resulted in Co-founding a Maker space in Berlin (Open Design City) by accident, a series of self organized festivals of making (Makerlab), and numerous DIY products and workshops. Presently Jay is working in Egypt to help Egyptians inspire one another to experiment, share and learn together.

                     The Supporters

Tayo Akinyemi

Tayo is the first Afrilabs director and an entrepreneurship enthusiast who has worked for several young ventures in the US, Africa, and Latin America. As a network organization, AfriLabs builds on a common vision to promote the growth and development of the African technology sector. As a community, we believe that by working together individual labs improve their chances of success, of generating more success stories and creating greater opportunities for their members. As of today, the AfriLabs network is comprised of 20 hubs and labs across the continent. 

David Moinina Sengeh

David was born and raised in Sierra Leone and is now a Ph.D candidate at the MIT Media Lab where his research focuses on the design of comfortable prosthetic sockets and wearable interfaces. He is also the president and co-founder of an international NGO that has distributed over 15,000 mosquito nets in Sierra Leone. Currently David's main project is Innovate Salone, the first-ever competition created to foster a culture of innovation among high-school students in Sierra Leone. 

Dan Barry

President and Founder, Denbar Robotics, former Astronaut. Dan is a former NASA astronaut and a veteran of three space flights, four spacewalks and two trips to the International Space Station. He retired from NASA in 2005 and started his own company, Denbar Robotics that creates robotic assistants for home and commercial use, concentrating on assistive devices for people with disabilities. He received numerous honors. A few of them are the following: 2000 and 2002 NASA Exceptional Service Medals, 2001 Top 10 in the world career spacewalk hours, 100 Most Notable Princeton Graduate School Alumni of the 20th Century, Harvard Medical School Paul J, Corcoran Award and honorary doctoral degrees from Beloit College and St. Louis University.

Denisa Kera

Denisa Kera is a philosopher and a designer, one of the initiators of the GeekDiplomacy.org network supporting research in developing countries. She builds design prototypes, critical probes and tools for common people around the world to reflect, deliberate and participate in emergent science and technology issues. She follows and studies science community labs, alternative R&D places (Hackerspaces, FabLabs, DIYbio) as a new model of how to connect policy and design. She has extensive experience as a curator of exhibitions and projects connecting art, technology and science, and previous career in internet start-ups and journalism. Currently, she works as an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore and Asia Research Institute fellow, where she is trying to bring together Science Technology Society (STS) studies with Interactive Media Design.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!