About four years ago, I acquired a 3D printer to assist my mechanical design work and listed it online for potential clients to send me design files to be produced. At that time, there were only two people in Nigeria doing this: Stampar3D in Isheri, Lagos and my outfit in Yaba.
In the same year, two colleagues and I started to develop a sensor that could measure the amount of fuel in any automobile and send those results to a mobile phone. Our solution was a response to fuel meter tampering at filling stations, we wanted clients to know exactly – in litres – how much fuel they bought. Our technology had its flaws, but it worked really well. What we didn’t know how to do was develop that prototype to a product that could be manufactured.
The reasons for this can be summed up in one statement: making proprietary hardware is hard, but in Nigeria it can be almost impossible. I recall a sunny afternoon walking through a spare parts market looking for an M2.5 screw (a screw with a diameter of 2.5mm), no one had it.
We were lucky to go to Nairobi to show our technology at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Innovation Showcase and saw Kenya’s hardware development scene up close. It was different: there were a makerspaces available to help would-be inventors’ prototype parts and even investors funding hardware development. When we got back to Lagos we knew we had to do something to improve the outlook.
We called it Hardware Lagos, a community of makers and entrepreneurs attending meetups. In three years, we have organized eight events and have grown from 12 people attending the first one to running out of seats at Capital Square, Ikoyi – who hosted us for many of our meetups.
In the earlier meetups, the conversation focused on technical details. How could we make products or prototypes with the tools we had? Who had special tools? What resources were available in the community?
In the later meetups, the conversations have changed. Now, members of the community are concerned with manufacturing, developing relationships with overseas partners, market sizes and market research.
There are other things that have shaped the conversations. We have seen members of the community get jobs and internships as a result of attending events and networking, and we have seen startups come to the event to attract talent. We have also seen would-be founders look for partners.
In April 2019, we organized our first conference which ran for three days from Thursday, April 4th until Saturday, April 6th.
The first two days were dedicated to technical workshops: Developing IoT Mesh Networks, Urethane Casting, Managing a Makerspace and Building off-grid solar power. The workshops were given by technical experts from outfits likeLumkani, the South African company producing alarm systems, andSunHive, the Nigerian solar energy engineering provider.
On Saturday, the focus was different. Business development but for hardware businesses was the theme of the sessions. Here, we listened to a range of speakers. Starting with SesinamDagadu ofSnooCODE telling us about the location-mapping technology which has been used by Ghana’s National Ambulance Service and is being developed to power drones, to KolawoleAkinboye ofRensource Energy giving behind-the-scenes details of their project empowering SME clusters in the Kano with micro-utilities.
Hardware product development is still pretty tough, especially in Nigeria. Last year, we ran a survey among our members and saw that while it’s easier to build a prototype than before, it is still painful to move forward with that prototype to a product.
One of the ways we think could help is a mentorship programme where hardware developers are paired with an experienced mentor. The programme will run in yearly cycles with a minimum time commitment for both mentor and mentee. We call it Advisory Board.
Applications arecurrently open to anyone in Nigeria building a hardware product and has a proof of concept with the plan to go to market. While there is a long way to go for hardware, we want to make its development softer.
Chuma Asuzu
Asuzu (@CaptainUnibrow) is a design engineer and co-organizer of Hardware Lagos.
