1. Name of organization.
TanzaniaOSH
2. Email address (or preferred and reliable way of official contact).
tanzaniaosh@btech.co.tz and tanzania@africaosh.com
3. Tell us about your organization.
Tanzania Open Science Hardware (TanzaniaOSH) is a Registered NGO under the Non-Governmental Organization Act 2002, with a registration number 00NGO/R/2606.
Vision
To Make Open Science and Hardware ubiquitous in Tanzania and beyond.
Mission
To provide a friendly environment for the individuals interested with Open Sciences and Hardware principles, methods, and practices, as a means of achieving locally adaptable technologies that will foster economic growth in Tanzania and Africa as a whole.
Objectives
- Empower the African Community, which comprises of makers, hackers, practitioners and researchers in science and technology inclusive of government officials, private sector players and civil society across the African continent, the global south, and the world as a whole, on Open Science and Hardware.
- Raising awareness in the Tanzanian community and beyond, about the benefits of Open Sciences and Hardware practices as means of achieving locally adaptable technologies that will foster economic growth in Africa.
- Empower and enable local innovators/makers to solve the local community’s needs and challenges.
- Promote sustainable practices and processes for knowledge transfer and collaboration, guided by Open Access and Open-Source philosophies, in Tanzania and elsewhere in the world.
Previous Events
- AfricaOSH Summit in 2019 in Dar es Salaam – Tanzania.
Our team hosted a successful second AfricaOSH Summit. A summit that brought together a number of participants from across the globe and opened a broad conversation on making Open Science and Hardware ubiquitous in Africa.
4. Does your organization have representation for a marginalized demographic due to factors such as, but not limited to, race, ability, place of birth, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class situation or other identification? If so, how?
Yes.
Africa as a whole suffers from a lack of access to resources, quality education and poor supply chains making it even harder to source materials here.
Our organization is 100% representing marginalized population on the global stage fully being dedicated to Tanzanian and African development!
Specifically, innovation in Tanzania faces a great challenge! A very limited part of the population had the chance to join the formal educational system. This leads to a great divide between them and the ones who are formally trained and greatly hampers innovation.
In practice, the local fundi (workers) have a lot of good ideas and projects, but they don´t feel that they are part of the community.
TanzaniaOSH fights to bridge the gap between innovators/makers who have gone through formal education and those with informal education, along with the other stakeholders in the ecosystem: policy makers, researchers and academia practitioners, so as to build a strong and a sustainable pool of problems solvers.
Our policy is to ensure inclusiveness of all actors and players in the ecosystem, from across all socio-economic demographics, irrespective of their religion, ethnic, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class situation or other identification.
TanzaniaOSH seeks to open a conversation by and for Africans on how to benefit and participate to the maker movement, open science, and open hardware, from our own social, cultural, political, and environmental realities, yet connecting with the bigger global community.
5. What is the event about, and what do you want to achieve with it?
Event type:
Summit with Hands-on workshops.
Theme:
How to bring open source hardware production to the next level; Lessons from all around Africa.
Presentation
Africa has different constraints than the developed world. We need our projects to make our living for us to be able to dedicate time to them.
To do that, we need to help makers and open source hardware contributors to make a business that enables them to make a living wage.
We identified different labs that managed to do that by designing their own products, producing open source and collaborating with researchers locally and across the world and selling them in their region. We want to invite them to share their experience and enable everyone to follow their hard learned lessons to become more autonomous and liberate more resources to accelerate the adoption of open source practices.
We want to do that by inviting different people to speak:
- MboaLab, from Cameroon, to speak about how they build a business from open source enzyme production.
- FabLab Rwanda, who produced for 200 M RWF (±200k$) during COVID allowing it to go from a governement subsidized company to, soon a self-sustaining business.
- BongoTech, describing scientific collaborations with Universities.
- University of Bath on documentation and building an OSH community.
- Ariasana Ltd, about accelerating distributed manufacturing through shared businesses and open communities.
- …
We are looking for other speakers from all around Africa and the world promoting and implementing open source practices.
Invitees
We will invite makers from all around East Africa to bring the community closer, be inspired, learn and go back home with partners and a plan to start their own lab.
Locally, we will also invite Tanzanian informally educated workers to join us, be inspired, bridge this divide and propagate our message in their community.
We also want everyone to be able to join and benefit from the talks so we will set everything up to have a hybrid event enabling everyone to join but also recording and editing the content to make it available for the ones who missed it!
Expected Outputs
- Kickstart the community of OSH actors across East Africa and facilitate collaboration.
- Creating a TanzaniaOSH roadmap that aligns with both AfricaOSH and GOSH.
- Publishing a guide with advice and a roadmap to build a lab.
- Created a pool of sustainable solutions easily available and producible locally.
- Creating awareness towards the utilization of Open Sciences and Hardware principles, methods, and practices, as a means of achieving locally adaptable technologies that will foster economic growth in Tanzania and Africa as a whole.
- Videos and other media available for spreading awareness online through GOSH network and our own
Impact
We´ll measure the impact of the Summit by measuring :
Impact on one participant x Number of participants
Specifically, we aim to:
- Aware of open source hardware principles
- Connected to the regional community and to other makers across the GOSH Community working on similar problems
- Able to start a business to develop, contribute and commercialize OSH products
- Happy to have come to the conference
We will evaluate these indicators by asking the participants their opinion throughout and after the event.
Event duration
The event will be held in 3 days.
6. Which of the three levels of funding would you like to apply for? (in round 1 only USD $9910 is available for applications, in further rounds $3000, $6000, or USD $9910 will be available).
Round 1 ($9910)
7. What is the funding for? Describe your budget. List what you are going to spend it on and how.
We will use the funding for: Inviting speakers, renting a space, arrange catering. Besides that, we will set up a system to record and allow a hybrid event enabling everyone to join the conference through the internet.
We will also be using the funding for the set-up of a prototyping area close to the conference hall with machines and supplies available to last the duration of the conference and build flagship open source products of the event. We will have identified and crowdsourced ideas and that require innovative products that could be built with simple machines across developing countries.
Budget
| Item | Quantity | Nb days | Unit cost USD |
Total cost USD |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transportation | 2,750.00 | |||
| Transport for Participants | 15 | 50.00 | 750.00 | |
| Transport for Speakers | 10 | 200.00 | 2,000.00 | |
| Accommodation | 1,200.00 | |||
| Participants | 0 | 3 | 40.00 | - |
| Speakers | 10 | 3 | 40.00 | 1,200.00 |
| Conference hall | 600.00 | |||
| Meeting Hall for 100 people | 1 | 600.00 | 600.00 | |
| Food and beverage | 2,700.00 | |||
| Lunch | 100 | 3 | 7.00 | 2,100.00 |
| Snacks | 100 | 3 | 2.00 | 600.00 |
| Communications | 880.00 | |||
| Banners | 3 | 60.00 | 180.00 | |
| Promotion and Advertisement | 1 | 150.00 | 150.00 | |
| Photography and Video | 1 | 500.00 | 500.00 | |
| Social Media management | 1 | 50.00 | 50.00 | |
| Materials expenses | 1,775.00 | |||
| 3D printing filament | 5 | 35.00 | 175.00 | |
| Assorted Electronics Components | 1 | 1,000.00 | 1,000.00 | |
| Materials for laser cutter: Wood, Acryllic, Cardboard | 1 | 400.00 | 400.00 | |
| Internet Installation | 1 | 200.00 | 200.00 | |
| TOTAL | 9,905.00 |
8. How will you share the outcomes of this event? What documentation will result that will benefit the community as a whole? (videos? photos? a how-to? innovative hardware designs?).
We will gather all the business approach to make a guide on what we’ve learned and how it can be used in small makerspaces to become fully fledged businesses.
We will have a cameraman onsite during the event during the event and release in small edited clips to increase the visibility of GOSH on social media as well as the complete conferences.
We will encourage the community to design, build and document products that answer challenges we identified together.
9. How would your event address GOSH’s values of diversity and inclusion?
- Keen consideration to achieving a fair representation of the regional community, specifically encouraging women to step up and take the stage.
- The call for participation will go through Tanzania Mainland, Zanzibar and other Eastern African countries.
- Aim at a gender balanced group through the selection process of the participants.
10. Are there any conflicts of interest that you wish to declare?
No!