In May 2008 we unpacked a Fab Lab at the edge of a bustling, growing city set in a wide fertile wet valley. Jalalabad, in the eastern province of Nangarhar, was a far cry from the vast dry deserts or foreboding mountainous terrain with small hamlets of traditional living which compose popular images of Afghanistan. The inhabitants of this ancient trade route city are a mix of ethnicities, tribes, and nationalities and there is a long tradition of education and commerce. However, today insecurity plagues the region. Corruption, and the difficulty of making and upholding contracts discourages significant foreign investment which could provide much needed jobs and infrastructure. In this context we sought the effects of providing ordinary people access to the means of technology development.
More than 4,000 users have used the lab facilities since May 2008, not including peripheral beneficiaries such as users on the FabFi network. The FabFi network, one of the Fab Lab technology development projects, serves approximately 50 families. More than 100 fab lab users are professional educators and the majority of remaining users are students. During the summer (peak attendance) the lab hosts 6 to 8 concurrent classes, 4 to 5 times per day with male and female open access hours several days a week. In September 2009 the lab moved from the suburbs to the city center into a considerably smaller space and attendance fell slightly, in particular in the basic classes which had very high (100+:1) student:teacher ratios. The most common classes have a 20:1 student:teacher ratio and a 2:1 to 3:1 student to computer or machine resource ratio.
The impact of our work in Jalalabad has been much broader than our initial goals. Our grant proposal described a lab where people might create custom products for themselves which are difficult to obtain in the mass market such as eye glasses and prostheses. Two and a half years later, the ongoing, self-organized, day-to-day operation of the lab in the midst of a conflict zone is a major acheivement in and of itself. The lab has spawned technology transfer, invention and the stimulation of local enterprises. These activities in the Jalalabad Fab Lab reflect globally shared, unanswered concerns in education, technology development, and entrepreneurship and simultaneously point toward ways to begin to address some of those concerns.
These findings highlight significant updates since the first year’s report. Section I describes activities addressing education, especially the teacher shortages and approaches to technical education; section II describes an effective, collaborative multi-national technology development project driven by local needs; and section III the users’ foray in entrepreneurship and business management. These areas are important not only for conflict regions but for both developed and developing worlds. The lessons we’ve learned in this work translate across political, intellectual, and social boundaries.
I. EDUCATION: “LEARN TO TEACH / TEACH TO LEARN” USER LED CLASSES FOR EXPONENTIAL REACH
Demand for teachers is rising worldwide as more youth present themselves at school. Teachers in developing countries tend to be young and inexperienced and generally lack opportunities for continuing education. These trends are also present in Afghanistan. Here there is a heavy focus on providing training for grade school level teachers and certain specialized fields such as medicine and security. Teacher shortages are critical at present and expected to grow much faster than is possible to produce qualified teachers.
A core tenant in the FabLab is ad hoc, just in time, peer to peer teaching. A student who has recently learned a skill or concept will eagerly show his or her nearby peers. Those peers will enthusiastically repeat the process, learning and sharing that knowledge with those around them. Lab users shift back and forth between the roles of student and teacher and in doing so can exponentially increase number of trained users.
While a complete, traditional liberal arts education usually requires an overseeing facilitator or curriculum to guide the totality of topics to be covered, the first few years of the fab lab are showing that peer-to-peer viral teaching methods are a viable manner to train large numbers of students with a very small number of instructors. Our experience also shows that this method persists over time–producing generations of teacher-learners beyond the tenure of the first participants. This phenomenon not only holds true for training in techological skills, but for educating in other domains as well.
In May 2008 the first set of student-teacher users in Jalalabad were trained in the use of fab lab equipment and processes through projects that integrated interests with technology applications. Additional training sessions were held on a variety of topics in the ensuing year, sometimes with different user groups. Most of these lessons were project-centric and heavily hands-on experimental. Commensurate with other developing nations with little technical infrastructure, students were not experienced in the use of computers and similar technologies. Students with better English or technical skills quickly stood out and were encouraged to organize sessions where they, not the international collaborators, would teach the other students. As of May 2010, second, third, and fourth generations of local users are teaching each other a wide range of topics including English, operating systems, networking, photography, office software tools, photo and video editing, typing, and more, sometimes overlapping with topics normally taught in a formal school.
The average Afghan in Jalalabad has very little free time outside of chores, studies or work. Nonetheless since 2009, an estimated 2,500 users have “graduated” from regularly meeting classes at the Fab Lab. Class sizes range from 20 to 200 students and frequently several classes are taught simultaneously. The limitations to class size are due to the number of computers, equipment and available space. There is no lack of student interest, nor lack of teachers, due to the learn-to-teach, teach-to-learn approach where the teachers from within their own ranks. In some classes, students move all furniture out of the lab rooms and squat on the floor, packed in shoulder to shoulder. Users are free to arrange to collect a small fee per student for regular classes to help make teaching as attractive as working on personal projects. A portion of the teaching fee is sometimes donated back to the lab to help with materials and maintenance costs.
Amongst the second generation of students in the Fab Lab were teachers from a local public school who had complained of no opportunities for further education. The Fab Lab envi- ronment provided them with opportunities for futhering their professional develpment. Bagrami school serves 3,000 to 5,000 students with approximately 45 teachers. Bagrami, a village on the outskirts of Jalalabad, has only one paved road, no power, and receives few public services. Over the last year, these teachers were taught basic computer skills by a fab lab user who was himself going to the Fab Lablab to learn to use a computer controlled wood router. Having “graduated” from the basic computer skills class, the teachers have organized themselves to teach the same topics to their students this summer. Teaching, they say, will help reinforce what they’ve learned and help them make the case to someday include computers in the school’s curriculum.
While it isn’t surprising that learning technical, computer, or English skills can immediately translate to personal economic gain, it is surprising how valued these skills are in the current economy, and how quickly they can lead to employment. “Graduates” of an office tools class, taught by a 3rd year university student, were able to immediately find jobs with local NGOs and businesses. The “teach-to-learn / learn-to- teach” behavior embedded in the Fab Lab environment is a bit like a pyramid scheme – that works. Some of our graduates continue to teach ad hoc sessions in the lab on the same tools that graduates are using to gain real-world experience and application. One teacher now reports that he sometimes learns something new from his graduates – who were his students only months ago!
II. MULTI-NATIONAL COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGY DEVELOPMENT: THE FABFI COMMUNITY WIRELESS PROJECT
In many of Afghanistan’s cities, basic infrastructure such as roads, sewers, power grid, and communications are largely damaged, unmaintained or inadequate. Such lapses in infrastructure leave the country physically, economically and socially fragmented. While it is difficult for individuals to build roads, string power lines or dig sewers to bridge existing gaps, they are learning to build innovative local infrastructure alternatives, such as meshed wireless data networks that allow individuals to build communications one link at a time.
The goal of the FabFi project was to lay groundwork for a user-implemented, locally-grown wireless community. An international team of Fab Lab users (virtually) came together with interested Afghans to consider the communications infrastructure challenge and experimentally find a solution. Because Fab Lab machines and processes are the same world wide, the developers could work together almost as easily as if they were co-located, sharing work and expertise. The team was able to build on the open source contributions of collaborators world wide while sometimes making their own contributions to those projects. The end results are open and immediately portable to any and all other communities and locations.
FabFi is an open-source, Fab Lab-grown system using com- mon building materials and off-the-shelf electronics to transmit wireless ethernet signals across distances of up to several miles. With Fabfi, communities can build their own wireless networks to gain high-speed digital connectivity—thus enabling them to access online educational, medical, and other resources. Using the Fab Lab in Jalalabad as a portal, an initial cohort of local users learned to stand up these wireless links using locally sourced materials. In the process they gained valuable technical skills, opening new economic opportunities to themselves and their community, and leading the community toward a wave of viral network growth.
In January 2009, the Jalalabad FabLab demonstrated the capability of the FabFi system by establishing a high speed intranet among a village, hospital, university, and several offices and homes in Jalalabad. In addition to local content and services, the intranet was connected to a satellite uplink with dedicated high speed connection to the internet. Within 9 months the network grew to nearly 20 nodes– the most distant node being 4.97 miles away from the uplink. Today there are nearly 50 nodes throughout the city. The nodes are transmitting with a real throughput of 4.5Mbps to 11Mbps. The growth and maintenance of the network is handled by local fab lab users. The system has worked consistently through heavy rain, smog, sand storms and despite a couple of good sized trees.
These low-cost, locally-produced mesh networks can be easily extended across isolated villages and towns, opening doors to the outside world and facilitating socio-economic development from the ground up. After intensive hands-on training and practical experience, the Jalalabad Fab Labbers are well on their way to self-sufficiency in the maintenance and expansion of their own local network, with a long list of locations lined up to be linked up.
Recently the Jalalabad network users have demonstrated innovation and successful technology transfer by evolving the reflector design in the system to accommodate locally available materials. The team experimented with used USAID vegetable oil cans, carefully cutting them apart and flattening them, then shaping them to function as the reflector. While still in need of significant refinement, the oil can reflectors work well. These reflectors are clear physical signs of technology transfer and local human-capital development in the technology domain. They also cost less than $3US!
Despite the cobbled-together aesthetic, FabFi has proven incredibly reliable in Afghanistan’s harsh climate where it reaches 130 ◦F in Jalalabad in the summer with regular sandstorms. In 1.5 years of deployment, we can still count the hardware failures on one hand. To our surprise, the biggest challenge so far has been uplink bandwidth. With e-society still in its infancy within the country, users still pull most of their content from outside the country, keeping the system’s satellite connection to the WWW at the throughput limit nearly 20 hours a day – in a city where power is available less than 12 hours each day. With the release of FabFi 3.0 in April 2010, we hope to facilitate the development of local content through a dynamic web dashboard, and optimize our proxy server to serve more content locally.
The ability of people with no technical background to effect such an large technology-based impact caught the attention of the media. FabFi has been featured in numerous print and online media articles, including major tech blogs such as Gizmodo.com, BoingBoing.net, Discovery.com[1] , and NOS news in the Netherlands. It has also been covered in non-tech focused media from the Boston Herald[2] to the Huffington Post[3] and even on the National Public Radio show “All Things Considered”[4] .
In Fab Labs, technology brings people and ideas together. FabFi embraces this same principle. The public hospital, which houses the endpoint of FabFi Afghanistan’s longest link, has become a shared community resource, providing downlinks to a growing number of locations in the city center. The shared infrastructure facilitates communication between FabFi users all over the city as they collaboratively grow and maintain the network. This is good news in a community where sharing and collaboration are not the norm and points to windows opening to other economic opportunities with regional and global partners. The FabFi user group is learning valuable skills that will soon enable them to generate revenue for themselves.
Because FabFi is fundamentally a technological and sociological research endeavor, it is constantly growing and changing. FabFi is a completely open source system and contributions come from a global, distributed base. Over the coming months we expect to see infrastructure improvements to improve stability and decrease cost, and add features such as bandwidth aggregation to support a growing user base. In addition to network improvements, there are plans to leverage current connectivity levels to build online communities and locally hosted resources for users in addition to MIT OpenCourseWare, Wikipedia, and more, making the system much more valuable than the sum of its uplink bandwidth.
[1] http://planetgreen.discovery.com/tech-transport/trash-wifi-afghanistan.html
[2] http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/20100411high- trashnology mit helps afghans transform garbage into wifi/
[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/fabfi
[4] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125866561&sc=emaf
III. ENTREPRENEURSHIP: THE T-SHIRT CLUB
A functioning society is rooted in an individual’s ability to maintain a livelihood. In the modern manner of living where an individual can not grow or raise everything to sustain self and family, we might colloquially say “people need jobs”. Economist are hard pressed to identify a single country whose government can provide jobs for all people. With a per capita GDP of $800 (not including illicit revenues) this is certainly true of Afghanistan. While international aid can create short term temporary jobs, only private enterprise creates econom- ically sustainable permanent jobs. Afghanistan’s population continues to grow and the rapid creation of new private enterprises is doubly important.
The Fab Lab project in Jalalabad has enabled new, small enterprises to come into being in the course of teaching technical skills. As a result, important business skills and applied lessons in market economics are emerging from the fab lab, unintentional yet beneficial side effects of the presence of the lab and the way it can build local capacity.
Custom printing t-shirts is a way to have users learn a core Fab process while making a fun project. Printing a shirt requires the technical skills of computer use, digital design and image manipulation, mask fabrication, and data transfer. These processes and skills are immediately transferable to more technically complex projects like making antennas, flexible circuits, and a whole host of others. Students enthusiastically set about printing t-shirts, jackets, bags, and hats for them- selves and friends. They quickly taught other users the same process and expanded their design sets.
In January 2009 international fab lab collaborators made an attempt to turn this excitement into an opportunity to expose students to the small income possibilities of their new-found craft. Though rudimentary, the economics of t-shirt printing are similar to those of a childhood lemonade stand. While t- shirt printing is hardly a serious livelihood, there would be real value in teaching the transferable skills of accounting for inventory and finances with spread sheets, and word processing and typing for reporting and coordination. Working together our students established a sales price ($10 per shirt) and an order and payment tracking system at the adjacent international guest house (hotel). Results by mid-summer 2009 were very promising, “club” members sold on average 10 shirts each month for a gross profit of $90 each month. The club maintained on average 4-5 active members.
The club struggled with the accounting. Many more t-shirts (and items) were being produced than recorded – on one visit the entire guard and house staff at the adjacent guesthouse sported custom made shirts, hats, and jackets. The lead co- ordinator for the club explained that they could account for all the money, shirts, materials, and supplies but didnt know what to write down in the books because the template was too strict. Sometimes they sold shirts for less than $10, but what should they write then? Some of the materials cost much more or less than a standard shirt. And what if someone made and sold a shirt who wasnt part of the club? At this stage the accounting failed as a useful tool, the club would faithfully generate reports as a compulsory exercise but the exercise had no meaning.
By January 2010 there was no longer a t-shirt club. There were t-shirt clubs. The clubs are no longer being directed by a single coordinator who handles all incoming orders and they are printing materials other than shirts. In hindsight, we had accidentally set up a controlled or regulated market, where the fab lab regulated production and prices, metering out work to select students. The users railed against the restrictive environment and instead established a free market – where buyers and sellers establish prices and trade agreements without interference or intervention. Today there are niche producers – some are producing sports jerseys for the local teams (Jalalabad is the cricket capital of Afghanistan) while others target internationals. One group of university students wants to pursue contracts with the international firms who are currently sending orders for team shirts outside the country.
The role of the fab lab – here meaning both the place and the people – shifted from operating like a company to a taking a role similar to that of a government in a free market economy. It provides and maintains shared infrastructure and steps in to enforce “contracts” and “rights” of the users. The lab operates within the reality of Afghanistan, however, improvising and inventing solutions where infrastructure such as banking, mail, roads, and other resources are still being built. Inspired by projects like the FabFi where ordinary people working together draw on open established large scale infrastructure, the users experiment with pragmatic work-around solutions.
A somewhat surprising conclusion to the question: “what happens if ordinary people are given access to the means to technology development?” is that it provides a sanctuary of exploration and experimentation for systems of government and economics. We expected experimental forays in technical processes and the invention of locally relevant products. In addition, we found users “rapid prototyping” businesses that serve and work in the local context.
IV. CONCLUSION
While anecdotal, what we have found in the Jalalabad fab lab is a viable experimental approach to addressing critical challenges in education, technology transfer and innovation, and economic opportunity. Our results reveal a fairly sig- nificant community impact in a conflict zone, and point to promising broader implications for development regionally, nationally, and in other developing and developed world contexts. The preliminary findings need to be supported by continued observation, evaluation and careful data collection within an agile framework. The Fab Lab and digital fabrication technologies are a new thing and the novelty allowed a suspension of established habits which offered opportunities to try new approaches to old challenges. We were fortunate that the lab and its activities were able to operate “under the radar” and not subject to strict institutional procedures. This has helped the project succeed in the short term. Scaling this beyond Jalalabad is the natural next step, pushing technical capacity out of the city centers and across the region, laying foundations for economic growth and a more stable socio-political environment.
With this project we set out to establish a physical site where ordinary people had access to the means of technology development with a connection to the global Fab Lab community. What we found was way beyond our expectations – regular users addressing globally shared, seemingly intractable problems in a socially and financially reasonable way. This has implications not only for conflict regions, but also for both the developing and developed world in terms of technical capacity building, technology transfer, and business generation and entrepreneurship. Taken together, the global network of Fab Labs form an excellent testbed for global collaboration, demonstrating that ordinary, local people can pool their knowledge, resources and capacity to accomplish impressive, world-shifting results.
This is the “Findings” section reprinted from the final report for National Science Foundation award #0832234. Report submitted and approved on 06/30/2010.
I hate writing, which I regard as sheer misery, but in hindsight it seems well worth it.
