 Good morning Brighton, I'm very happy to be back here for the third time and after speaking about the optimism of technology and the future of money I would like to talk to you about people. And this is me when I was five years old in Romania. I grew up in the mountains in a small village in Transylvania and as I grew up I realized that my creativity and my access to inventing things, to testing things, my way of learning was conditioned by the fact that the girls were supposed to play with Barbies and dolls and the boys were allowed to do more technical things and they would have like these extreme games like the Transformers. So as I grew up I realized that played a very important role on my self-confidence and also on my curiosity. So I decided to create Hackydemia in order to allow both boys and girls to play together and to learn by doing in a very experiential and empirical way and we started organizing workshops for kids around the world and we would teach kids how to build microscopes from old webcams, how to design basically robots, how to test the water that is like that they are drinking, test the food they are eating. We also taught kids to teach each other so this is actually the best part of Hackydemia is that once one of them is understanding they can teach others and after a while we really realized that children and young people like to get involved in meaningful projects in their local communities. So we wanted to show that we should give them a chance to get involved because it's about their future as well. And about this point I met all these people from Afrilabs Network. These are founders of different organizations and movements in Africa and they invited me to go there and work with them and teach them how to teach kids. So we started this initiative called Afrimakers because it was about makers in Africa and why is it making so important in Africa? Because making in Africa is not only about a hobby or building some gadgets, it's actually a cultural manifesto. It's at the heart of what people are doing. It's not a commodity, it's a necessity. So you could notice how people are building boats out of a tree, how they are like creating their own fridges because there's no other alternative. They have their own welding gas and we decided based on this know-how and local tradition to actually enable and empower young people to solve problems in their local community and we selected 10 teams from all around Africa to propose projects they wanted to work on to solve a challenge in their local community. We started in Alexandria in Egypt and this was a team of mentors I was training them. Each team of mentors was receiving like one of our mobile labs just enough to get them started with rapid prototyping like some Arduino boards, a Raspberry Pi, some sensors and the best part is that after they were designing a project they had to go to schools and community centers and teach to kids and this is one of the projects that was developed in Alexandria. I really like this project because we talk a lot about conductive ink and all these industrial projects. They actually managed to do conductive paint with vitamin C and you can also do that in your kitchen today and then the most proactive mentors from Alexandria would travel with me to Kenya to train the new team of mentors over there so like this they would pass on knowledge and also get to know people that they could collaborate with within their region and I think this is really important to enable local people to share ideas and solutions because they share the same context, share the same resources and our desire to go and help is not always helping and these are pictures from some slums in Kenya where our mentors went to train so the contrast is huge. In 2014 we have schools in Kenya where every child has a computer like the private schools but we also have schools in the middle of a slum like this where a million people are living and I wanted our mentors to be exposed to that and to understand why it's important for them to work with both of these communities. After that we went to Tanzania. Here we had a project for example on the on the microscope we went to Ruan that we had to go to schools where there was no electricity and like drive on dirty roads for hours. We also had the big challenge of accessing parts and electronics so the local mentors had to invent and create their new boards. This is like an Arduino board that is only two dollars and a half that they put together by using all the electronic parts. We worked under harsh conditions. The longest time I stayed without electricity was in Botswana for five days and I think you know it's very important to to look at this experience and journey of making around Africa as something that we could all learn from like all the conditions we have for prototyping learning going to work we kind of take them for granted and these people don't have the same conditions but at the same time because they are facing all these big challenges they are sometimes more creative and better at improvising and after doing this whole journey of making we actually documented all the projects and the stories there is a book that will be launched next month on this project and there are a few learnings that I wanted to share with you today. One of the important things that I learned in this journey I was there for four months is to let go. There are a lot of things that I had to adapt to and I didn't understand and I was there more as an enabler but I really really wanted to focus on the people in the process and not on the outcomes because the idea of this project was to plant the seeds for local collaboration long term so it didn't matter what would happen in the immediate that what were the immediate results of these workshops it mattered more if these people would stay engaged and continue to work on this project. Don't compromise on values. The reason why we selected local teams that would propose projects to solve problems in their local communities because we thought like these people could connect at a value level and once we connect on a value level everything else works. Use humor when things become overwhelming. People always ask me because I travel a lot and work with people around the world how do I constantly adapt and I think humor is one of the best ways for doing that. Don't forget there are 15 stones. This comes from a Zen Buddhist temple in Japan. They always have 15 stones but no matter where you sit in the temple you're not able to see all the stones and this is kind of a spatial lesson that we it's really hard for us as a species to have an overview and to be able to always kind of understand how things are related and how things function and just accepting the fact that we can't see it all and we can't understand it all and question the way we see and understand things is important. Empty your cup, this is also like from from Zen Buddhism, we all can learn from each other but we need to be you know have this mental attitude to be willing and ready to learn from each other and as I told you this was in the beginning of this year so I wanted to show you what's the progress and the status of the some of the people that participated in the projects. Opemipo who's only 21 years old ever since has organized 10 workshops 10 additional trainings for local mentors in Nigeria they went to schools and has started an internship at Intel and he's constantly pushing this maker movement in Nigeria and pushing new activities for for his fellow students. I also wanted to to share the updates from Sharif, he was one of our mentors in Alexandria one of our fellows. Ever since Sharif actually started a company his company is called Resha. They're building a mobile laser cutter for crafts people. Most of the laser cutters today are around 3,000 euros their laser cutter is actually 250 euros and it's meant and built for craft women in Egypt to make their work easier and to enable them to earn more. I also wanted to share the story of our fellow from Botswana Bocamoso who's 23. She actually participated in a project in Berlin this summer where we built an invention lab in a shipping container and I'm gonna play a small video where she talks about her experience with afremakers and the camp. Hi what's your name? My name is Bocamoso Pallai from Botswana and where are we now? We are in Berlin here for a maker camp which is about making and creating core projects with their resources that we have. And what was your project at maker camp? My project at maker camp was electricity monitor which measures the amount of electricity consumption in homes. And how does that work? How it works is that we used a sensor my current sensor that looks like this why you yeah it's sort of a magnetic field here why you put a cable that you want to measure current flow in then you close it you run a program in them the problem that we wrote in the environment and then you just measure the current consumption for them. And why did you want to do this project? I wanted to do this project because from back home we have a lot of we have shortage of electricity and a lot of people are not aware of the amount of electricity they're using and how they're consuming it so I wanted to create something that will make them aware of the consumption that they are doing and how by so doing they'll be able to see that okay I'm consuming this message how much I can spread them so that you have enough when you run. And what's your plan now that you go back home how are you going to continue this project? Okay my plan is to tell people about the project try to chest it out in the market to see the acceptance of it and then from there if they're more interested get the community more involved in the project and try to develop something much more effective and get it in the market. And what did you learn at Makercam that you didn't expect it to learn? I learned so much we could talk all day I learned that project management is virtue like you have to know you have to have a step by step plan on how you do your projects from day one to accomplish in the project. I'm not a president who is a public speaker so we were forced to learn how to talk to the public and interact with people and I thought that was a very valuable lesson. What else we learned how to make the makerspace as you can see it and then the process of actually doing something like this from recycled materials and stuff so yeah that was the most valuable lessons that I had. And if you were to choose a favorite moment at the Makercam what would that be? Favorite moment was the success of the Makercam like the project finishing the projects on time and presenting them and actually having people that like the audience were impressed with what we had so I enjoyed that very much that you managed and if you had one month and you managed to succeed. And if you had a message with young to younger women back home what would you tell them? I would tell them the making field electronics engineering field is not just for men we also can do this as you can see I managed to create something that is very useful and very electronic I had to learn to use a circuit and mechatronics but I managed to give them a female and they all can do that so they shouldn't be afraid of the girls. Cool thank you very much. Thank you so much. Yeah so I know this is not as sexy as synthetic biology and artificial intelligence but these are the pains of growth of starting to actually implement that and distributing our future. For Bocamosa to come to Berlin we had to call the Botswana embassy for three weeks every single morning to get her visa we had three other mentors from Africa that couldn't come to our camp afterwards and she had to stand against her mother the minister of transportation of the country and many other people that were trying to convince her to stay and not lose a semester from university although she knew she would pass the exams so for a girl her age to be that brave it's actually really admirable and ever since she she went back like in the past two months in Botswana in Gabarone she's leading presentation workshops training continuing to work on her electricity consumption consumption monitor and this is what it means when you're trying to to take an idea to take the technology solve problems and actually do it with local people and local communities step by step and and I think this is important because I came across this this study from MIT and we talked about money and growth and innovations and actually some of these researchers from MIT discovered that the metric that is the most telling at predicting our growth across the planet is actually the economic complexity and this economic complexity is defined by the diversity of activities within the society and the diversity of products and actually this is a graph where you could see where we stand like on on the first line we have the economic complexity and on the other side we have GDP per person per capita Europe and Asia are on the right side and all the yellow dots are the countries in Africa so why is that like if we we take a closer look this is what US exports and you can see it's very diversified anything from cars medicine machines this is the one for UK so our economy is quite complex and we have a whole range of activities but if we look at Nigeria which is actually one of the biggest economies right now in in Africa this is how it looks like so where does this diversity comes from it's a lot around tacit knowledge around communities of practice around capacity building this is also like how how products are connected everything you see in violet is chemical products everything you see in blue is machine products everything we do is connected which is why this type of growth is only going to last as long and as we look into into the change and as we have all these people looking of the future of Africa are reducing poverty I actually think that this change starts with people so this is an equation that I imagined this morning so I I think time you know we can think about change like in amounts of time multiplied with the work which is defined by innovation and R&D and divided by the number of people and the amount of collaboration that is happening between all these people and I want you to look at this imagined equation and I think the key element there is time we do not give these people the time to create their own solutions to develop their own initiatives to develop their own project their own industry there is too much foreign intervention happening right now in Africa and the change there is not going to come from all this funding that we are pushing on the trends it's actually going to come from developing local infrastructure from developing local diversity from recognizing old local know-how and encouraging it and I think I think this is important and relevant for all of us because if we think about the history of innovations and the history of manufacturing we kind of went from this which is Bell Labs Tesla are when they they invented the first satellite in 1970s to this this is innovation today by the way like this is how we build things and I think there's something fundamentally wrong with it and my message for you today is that I think in the face of all these complex challenges that we're you know handling we need to play together we can't have the arrogance of thinking we are better or more intelligent and we need to accept the difference and recognize it and not impose our values over other people and actually invite them to the conversation and invite them to think with us how we're going to deal with these challenges and with these problems that affect us all in terms of climate change economic crisis so yeah that was my message for for you today and I I think one question that I would like to to leave you with is what is meaningful for you how can we add value in what we do every single day and how can we work on meaningful projects together and kind of challenge our views and challenge the way we were brought up in a particular system so yeah that was my presentation thank you