living room interior design in kenya

by the year 2050, the populationof africa will have doubled. one in four people on earthwill be african at that point, and this is both really excitingand daunting all at once. it's really exciting because,for the first time in the modern era, there will be enough africans on the earthto bully everybody else. (laughter) i'm only kidding. but it's daunting, because we're goingto have to have economies that can sustain this population growth,

and many of the peopleare going to be very young. now most of governments in africahave a plan for this economic growth -- in kenya, we call ours vision2030 -- and they're all predicatedon industrialization. the thing is, though, that the world is going through the fourthindustrial revolution right now, which means that there's a merger of the physical, cyber,and biological worlds. it means that because ofmassive interconnectivity

and the availabilityof artificial intelligence and robotics, many of the jobs that we knowand are used to right now won't exist in the future. so the challengeis a lot greater, in many ways, than it even was when asiawas industrializing, for example. to add to this, one of the kindsof person that you need for industrialization is an engineer, and they're really in short supplyon the continent. if you compare, for example,the number of engineers

that those same asian countries had a couple of decades agowhen they were industrializing, we fall far short. and i've taught for a while, and many of the studentswho are studying engineering end up actually workingin auditing firms and banks, and many of them spend half their timedoing accounting and so on as they're preparing. now, i was fortunate enoughto do my undergrad and postgrad education

in the uk and the us,in countries, environments, where there was all the equipmentthat you required, all the sophistication in the systems, and then i workedfor about three years in japan doing r&d for a large firm. and so i was very usedto having good equipment, and went back home and joined the faculty of engineeringat the university of nairobi, wanting to contributeand be on the continent.

and i quickly foundi was really quite useless, because there wasn't all the equipmentthat i had become accustomed to available. and i was teaching students who i wouldfind very bright ideas in their minds and they'd be presentingthings that i knew if only we had sufficient equipment, they'd be able to really contributeto the challenge of industrialization. so i kind of had to change hats,and became quite entrepreneurial and started looking for moneyto buy the equipment that we required. and i heard about a conceptout of mit, called the fab labs.

these are digital fabrication labs that allow, in a rather small spacewith not very expensive equipment, people to have access to these tools to be able to make almost anything, as the slogan goes. and so i was able to convincea government official to buy one of these for the universitywhere i was teaching. and immediately, we had wonderful results. we saw all kindsof innovations coming through,

and for the first timein this context at the university, engineering studentsfrom different disciplines were doing the lab and practical exercisestogether in the same space. normally, they'd be siloed. and not just that, but studentswho weren't engineers at all were also working in the same place, and non-students, peoplewho had nothing to do with the university, were also coming into this space. so you had this rich mix of people,

people who thinkdifferently from one another, and this alwaysis really good for innovation. i was really proud of what we were seeing. so you can imagine my surprise when one day the dean of engineeringcame and said to me, "kamau, the studentswho spend most of the time in the fab lab are failing their exams." i said, "what do you mean?" and i looked into it, and he was right,

and the reason they were failing is that they'd honed their skillsso well in certain things that they were going out into the cityand offering services for money. so they were making money -- and they thereforeweren't focusing on their studies. and i thought,what a good problem to have. don't quote me on that.i'm an academician. so we needed to scale this, and at the university,things were a bit too bureaucratic,

and so i moved out and i hooked upwith people who, in nairobi, were providing spaces for it experts to share fast internetand things like that. and some of these placesare really quite famous. they've made kenya famous for it. and together we set up a spacewhich we are setting up right now. we've moved from where we were. we are in a much larger space, and we're sort of making availablea wide range of equipment,

including the digital fabricationtools that i mentioned, and analog tools, to anybody really, on a membership basis. it's a bit like a gym,so you come in, you pay, you get taught how to use the equipment, and then you're set free to innovateand do whatever it is that you want, and you don't have to bean engineer, necessarily. and some of the people in the spaceare setting up a small company. they just need a space at a desk,

and so we provide that at a fee, and others take up bigger spacesand are able to set up their offices. they're further along. maybe their company has been runningfor a certain period of time. and so we're ableto accommodate all of this in an innovation spacethat is really quite active. what you're seeing in this imageover here is douglas, and douglas is an electrical engineer, one of the peoplewho was really active in the fab lab.

i'm pretty sure he passed his exams. and the image on the top leftis a copper sheet. and he designed a circuitthat the client came to him and said, "i need this circuitfor a pay-as-you-go system." and so this is a model for business that's made accessibility to goodsand services for very poor people really much easier,because they're able to pay a little bit, like a dollar a day, for example, for a specific service.

and so this company wantedto pilot a new idea that they had, and so they just needed 50 circuits, so they hired him to make them, and what you're seeing him doing there is, he's able to design on the computerwhat the circuit will be and then transfer itto an etching process -- that's the image on the top right -- and then populate the boardusing this robot. and so what would normally take him maybea day or something to solder by hand,

he can do in a few minutesusing this machine. so he was able to completethe entire order within gearbox, and this is really important, because if it wasn't forwhat we provided right now, he would have had to have hireda company in china to do this, and because it's such a small order,it would have taken a long time. it would be a small company, because big companieswouldn't take small orders, and even then, if they got a bigger order,

they'd bump him off in favor of that. and there's language problems and so on, so being able to do it in countryis really very important, and of course piloting as a phasewithin the progress of the business idea is extremely important, because you cango back and make corrections and so on. in this image -- thank you. (applause) in this image you see on the top left, what you're looking at is a 3d renderof a digital fabrication machine.

in this instance,it doubles as a plasma cutter and also a wood router. and so the plasma cutter makes possiblethe cutting of plate and sheet metal, and basically, you makea design on the computer and send it over to the machine, and then quickly and precisely,it will cut the shapes you want. but in this machine, you can also change the plasma cutterand put on a spindle, and then you can carve wood as well.

so this was designedby my head of engineering. his name is wachira, and when i hired him about two years ago, i asked him, "just give me two years, and by the time you've traineda lot of people so that we have good staff under you, then you can move outand become a good story for us." and that's exactly what's just happened. he's got two types of customers.

the higher-tier customer is a company that's actuallyusing his machine to cut sheet metalfor isuzu truck fabrication in nairobi, which is being done by general motors. so we're really proud to be able to say that we have an originalequipment manufacturer in nairobi that's provided what's effectivelyan industrial robot to supply parts for general motors. now this is really important --

and it's really important becausethe population growth being what it is, a lot of very large companiesare looking very closely at the market that's developing in africa. so in kenya right now, we havevolkswagen, peugeot, renault, we have mercedes doing lorries, and we've also got toyota,they've been there a long time. and these are all manufacturersplanning to assemble vehicles and in the future,to manufacture in the country. many of them are planningto train lots of people that they'd hire,

and that's really importantfor the economy, but when the magic really happens, when these companies begin to buytheir parts for the vehicles from local companies, so supply chain developmentis something that's very important for us to be able to pivotand to have very productive economies, and that's somethingwe're focused on at our space. this other image showsanother class of customer that he has. on the top left,

you have these peoplewho are actually using very crude tools to work metal and wood. and kenya has a populationof about 44 million people. the work force is about 13 million, and about 80 to 90 percent of thoseare in the informal sector. and what you're seeing in the imageat the top left over there is very typical of semi-skilled artisans who are making productsfor the marketplace that are really crude.

their production rate is very slow. the quality of the product isn't high. and so we've teamedwachira up with a bank, and the bank is paying himto train people from this sector on how to use this industrial robot. and the result is that some of them are going to be able to get loansto buy the machine for themselves. others will be able to go to centerswhere they can carry their material, get the design done,

and take the materials backthat have been made really, really fast and assemble them in their own spaces. so somebody making a gate,for example, out of metal, may take a week to make just one gate, but with this machine,they might make 10 in a day. so the productivity of a large swatheof our population should be able to jump by a quantumamount, quite significantly, because of this kind of machine. and that's what we're at the beginning of,so this is really very exciting.

this is another person who uses our space. her name is esther. she's in her mid-20s, and she came in very passionateabout a problem that she explained. she said that schools days are missedevery month by young girls because of their menstrual cycle, and they're not ableto buy a sanitary towel. and the reason that she described was that the manufacturerspackaged these in bundles of seven to 10,

and breaking it downis unhygienic at the retail level, and packaging each oneof them is too expensive. so she thought up an idea,which is brilliant, and simple. why don't we just use vending machines? and she, in a very clean environment,can break down the bundles and fill up the vending machines, and then girls can buythese sanitary towels in the privacy of a toilet,in a public space, in a school, and so on. she was able to pilot thisand it worked really very well,

and she's been able to sort ofget the bugs out and so on. so the significance hereis that the piloting process is possible. she's not an engineer. she was able to engage people in our spaceto be able to help her to do this, and she's off and running nowwith a business accelerator, so we expect to see great results. in this image you're looking at -- the result of a master's projectthat was done at university of nairobi by tony nyagah, an engineering student,

and he just integrateda solar cell into a roof tile and decided to make it a business. he joined up with his sisterwho is an architect, and they have this business, and they present the roof tile to a personwho is doing development and say, "you can buy it for the costof just the roof tile without the solar." so they're giving it at a discount, and then they'll build themusing the internet of things over time, they'll pay about a thirdof the utility charges for the electricity

and they can sell the excessback to the grid. and so they'll make their money over time, and they've been able to doquite a few installments. we were very proud to be ableto show this to somebody kind of famous, as you can see there, and this other famous guyactually presented the same idea, but as far as we're concerned,if it was after us, so -- so in closing, going forward,of course being able to prototype and do low manufacturingin this kind of a setting

is very importantfor the industrialization process, but we're also taking advantageof a lot of new ways of doing things: the open source movement, distributive manufacturing,circular production. so it's all very importantfor not just industrializing and being able to meet people's needs, but also making surethat the environment is taken care of. we're also really interested in culture. we have lots of discussions in our spacearound who we were as africans,

who we are today, and who we want to be vis-ã -vis things like consumerismand ethnicity and corruption and so on. so we see ourselves as providing,adding value to people by teaching them to add valueto things or materials so that they can build things that matter. thank you very much for your attention. thank you.

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