Kick-starting the Nairobi 3D-printing ecosystem

Hello, my name is William Hoyle. I’m a trustee of Tech4Trade, a small UK-based not-for-profit organisation with a focus on poverty alleviation in sub-Saharan Africa. For the last few years, we’ve been working on the development of a small-scale circular manufacturing process that uses discarded plastic waste to produce 3D printing material for local fabrication.

Essentially, a process that takes something like this, a discarded plastic bottle, and turns it into this, a 3D printing filament made from recycled plastic waste. We now have a working prototype of the end-to-end system established at our workshop in Nairobi, and we have designed all of the equipment and machines needed for this process to work on an open hardware basis, in other words, under open-source licence. Most recently, we have been trialling this end-to-end process to take recycled plastic bottles and the filament that they produce, and to print products that can be used in a local community setting.

Last year, we ran a trial in 12 Nairobi schools, which we supplied with around 50 science teaching microscopes. This is an early prototype of the microscope. It plugs into the USB into a screen or into a laptop, and these microscopes were used for science teaching.

The feedback we had was absolutely tremendous, and we can produce a microscope like this and sell it commercially for around $20 to $25. We’ve also been working with a couple of small donors, in Nairobi very recently, to fabricate PPE equipment, things like visors and respirators, for use in the fight against COVID-19. We think that the prototype system we’ve built is now at a stage where we can start considering how we replicate it in other countries.

We’re currently working with two UK universities, Aston and Leicester de Montfort, to improve all of the build instructions and videos required by a third party to enable them to replicate what we’ve done in Nairobi. We’re going to be testing that material later this year with two partners, one in Lagos, a group called STEM Cafe, and another in Kigali in Rwanda, a group called Digital Hub. By the end of the year, having completed that process, we think we will be ready to work with another commercial partner, and we’re hoping that with the help of Sophie, we can find that partner in South Africa and come up with a partnership that works for both of us and can maximise the potential for social impact and sustainable business growth that we think this technology can offer.

Thanks very much.