Made in Africa

Inquiry

Dear OSE Team,

The Mab Foundation is committed to building an African youth-led industrial revolution by locally designing and manufacturing machinery for perfumery, cosmetics, detergents, agro-food, and recycling.

Your open-source philosophy and the Global Village Construction Set perfectly match our mission. We are eager to:

Collaborate on adapting OSE designs for African contexts (e.g., soap mixers, small agro-food processors).

Engage OSE experts in training African youth engineers.

Share progress from our Mab Innovation Campus in Johannesburg as a demonstration site.

We would be honored to co-develop a framework for African innovation that expands the open-source hardware movement across the continent.

For your reference, we have attached a short concept note outlining the initiative

Looking forward to your positive response.

Sincerely, Juthland Maboukou Founder & Head of Training and Incubation, Mab Foundation 📞 +27 67 687 3605

Response

Dear Juthland,

Thank you for reaching out. Do you have staff, an operating budget, and facilities? Please share your roadmap and business plan if you have one.

Your mission strongly resonates with OSE. The best way to start is by demonstrating traction on one concrete build. We suggest starting with the 3D printer (open source design is https://wiki.opensourceecology.org/wiki/D3D_Pro_v23.12). If your team can replicate and document this build at the Mab Innovation Campus, it will provide a solid foundation for scaling up collaboration. This could relate to upcycling by taking trash plastic and turning it into useful products.

Parallel to this, we invite one or two of your youth engineers to join our upcoming Builder Crash Course in Missouri. This would give you first-hand immersion in OSE methods, which you could then apply locally.

Once you’ve published your first documented build, we’d be glad to co-develop a framework for African innovation together.

Thanks,

Marcin