In the midst of a severe earthquake that registered 7.8 on the Richter magnitude scale, Nepal was shaken, villages were levelled, avalanches triggered, and millions affected. Nearly 9,000 died, around 22,000 were injured, and 3,000,000 – a tenth of the country’s population – were made homeless. The country sandwiched between India and China was brought to its knees.
As aid and rescue teams from countries near and far descended on Nepal, ‘tent cities’ were erected, and within them, similarly constructed hospitals cared for the injured. These make-shift emergency centres are critical in crises such as this, saving hundreds, perhaps thousands, of lives at each catastrophic event. But they rely, as so many services do, on a consistent electricity supply, something an earthquake-ravaged setting, for example, can hardly guarantee. In one particular clinic in Nepal in 2015, there was an outage. Suddenly the chances of survival for each patient was cut dramatically.
“There was a huge electrical socket that had broken. That represented about 25% of their capacity, and when that electrical socket broke, that meant the ward did not have electrical power. What they needed was a fixture to put it back in place. A unique item that would have had to be shipped in, then they would have had trouble finding it. [We] were able to engineer a new one at a fraction of the cost what the replacement would [typically] be, and restore the power for the ward.”
“It took us about a day and a half to take it all apart, measure it up, then print it out. It took us two goes. That first one didn’t quite fit. We printed out another and it worked. And then we printed a stronger one with solid infill. Bringing in a new part was virtually impossible for them because the piece of equipment was made in Italy and, it was really typical, they didn’t make that piece of kit anymore so there weren’t any spare parts to be had. It was a 3D printed part but it was pretty much a like-for-like for replacement. Even if the spare part had been available I probably wouldn’t have bothered in that case.”
Telling the story is first Eric James, the co-founder and Director of Field Ready, and second, Abi Bush, a Global Technical Advisor of the multinational humanitarian aid organisation using the latest technology to manufacture locally and reactively in the context of the problems that arise in global crises.
Since the 25-strong team’s first deployment in Haiti in 2014, the aid workers have offered their services in South Sudan, the South Pacific, Syria, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, the United States and the Virgin Islands, and, of course, Nepal. What distinguishes this team, so busy and geographically widespread that all 25 are yet to be in the same place at the same time even once, is its approach to humanitarian aid.
“The idea came from two sides of the same coin,” James recalls. “One, of frustration with how things have been going with humanitarian aid. Time after time we would be working in a place and we didn’t have the most basic supplies because the supply chains involved in those operations are very difficult to set up. There’s obstacles throughout each link in that supply chain, and there’s never sufficient funds to fix them so we had to find a better way to work. And that’s the other side of the coin, our deep passion to have a genuine social impact, a humanitarian impulse, in what we do.
“It’s those two things that brought a great team together and we’ve been working for about five years now on how to bring a transformation to this particular problem, parts of that is with technology, parts of that is getting people to think in different ways around local manufacturing.”
Those supply chain issues occur all over the world, according to James, and he should know. He’s been an international humanitarian aid worker since the mid-1990s. After a decade and a half in the space, it was on a summer trip to San Francisco in 2012 where the idea for Field Ready was born. Inspired by the activity in Silicon Valley, Field Ready would strive to transform the traditional humanitarian supply chain, implement a team with aid and rescue expertise; engineering knowledge and experience; healthcare proficiencies; and an unwavering will to help others. Some had been out in the field before, others had consulted for the United Nations, there’s graduates from some of the world’s best universities in there, and Dara Dotz, a co-founder of the organisation, had held a position at another company with new ideas around manufacturing: Made In Space.
Bush is a manufacturing engineering graduate from Cambridge University and also boasts prior humanitarian support experience through Engineers Without Borders. Her first assignment with Field Ready saw her out in Nepal for 12 months where, perhaps, the organisation’s ethos has so far been best demonstrated.
When the Field Ready team arrived in Nepal, as is the case wherever they go, needs assessments are carried out to calculate where their local manufacturing capabilities are most urgently required. In health care centres, inventory checks find the parts that are missing and, wanting to bring the wait-time down from months to days, Field Ready gets to work manufacturing replacements. 3D printing is just a single means of manufacturing in a weighty toolbox, but it’s one of the most productive. Disposable tweezers and kidney trays are two easy wins, while the team has also printed otoscopes, for looking inside people’s ears, and umbilical cord clamps, which in some cases were being re-used such were the shortages of equipment.
“Probably the most impactful one was a really simple wrist brace,” Bush says, highlighting the damage earthquakes can do to one’s wrists and arms. “We just printed out a flat shape in PLA and if you put that in hot water it becomes malleable and you can form it to exactly fit a patient. We started making these as an experiment and it turned out they were insanely popular. We gave a couple to a clinic and they just kept demanding more. So, we ended up making a tonne of those, and to print it out of PLA, a flat shape, it didn’t take very long, The whole thing costs about $2.”
It’s not only within health clinics that Field Ready provides replacement and spare parts. It could be anywhere, like up a mountain with a desktop 3D printer hooked up to a car battery, or beside a property, the machine living off the power generated by solar panels. Water pipe fittings are another example of how 3D printing can be used to make a small part with a big impact. As James says, fresh water is paramount after a natural disaster, and making sure it is not open to contamination by ensuring the piping is secure is one of the many ways Field Ready helps the locals.
And though primarily a humanitarian aid organisation, Field Ready is also on hand to help with general development issues. In Nepal, Bush and her colleagues met a local entrepreneur who for ten years had been working on the design of a biomass cook stove. His new grill design would help maintain the oxygen flow throughout the burning of the fuel which would mean cleaner air in homes, and fewer lives lost. This man, Madhukar KC, was bidding to win a government contract, bringing the manufacture and retail of cook stoves into Nepal instead of a mass importation of cookers from South Africa, for example. He needed to make his cook stove design a couple of per cent more efficient to meet government regulations, had the idea to do it, but no means of manufacture to execute it. The original process involved Madhukar carving a pattern out of wood and then handing over to a sand casting factory who would make a sand mould form of that shape, and then pour molten iron into the cavity to produce the design. But for Madhukar’s new design, carving it out of wood was just too complicated. Enter Field Ready. And enter 3D printing. Working side by side, a CAD model was developed, several iterations completed, and then finally printed.
“We gave the 3D print to the sand casting factory, they made a prototype in metal, we got it tested at one of the testing facilities and it passed the test. Madhukar then got a contract for 210,000 cook stoves,” Bush remembers. “One single print for a chap with the right idea had a sand casting factory employed at capacity for one and a half years. It gave his business a huge boost, and you’ve also got 210,000 homes with cleaner air. That’s a huge win from one single print.”
The wrist brace and cook stove case studies, which are understandably Bush’s personal favourite uses of 3D printing technology to date, put the work Field Ready does into context. One helped Nepali people in the short term, and the other is set to have a lasting impact on not just people’s health and wellbeing, but their economy too.
“There’s a value for money aspect, so we try do things for as little as possible so they’re more easily replicable, but also if we’re making humanitarian supplies closer to where they’re needed, using local materials in the local market, then we’re actually supporting livelihoods and we’re contributing to the local economy far more than organisations that might spend $5m on 50 bits of equipment that they import from Kentucky or wherever. That does nothing for the local economy,” Ben Britton, Innovation Advisor, Nepal, Field Ready reasons. “We try and do what we can to meet local need. Obviously, that’s the first and foremost reason for doing what we are doing, but [we’re] doing it in a way that is actually far more beneficial to local economies, local people, than conventional ways of doing things.”
The mind-set that dictates this will to localise manufacturing works hand-in-hand with the philosophy of shortening supply chains for a much more efficient delivery of essential resources in the height of crisis. These resources can be as rudimentary as a bucket that families fill up at a well to collect fresh water.
“That bucket that’s needed is made in Pakistan, shipped to the UK, waits in storage and inventory, and then is shipped from Oxford to a place like Dubai, and then to Fiji or Nepal or wherever it is needed,” says James, making the point that there’s thousands of miles of unnecessary air travel involved, not exactly the most efficient economy model for the countries Field Ready operates in.
“They don’t have Amazon Prime in the places we’re talking about. They’re relying on what they can scrounge and what’s available through that regular humanitarian supply chain,” he continues. “If we can directly make things there on the ground and pass those skills on, teach others to make things, the significance of that is enormous. And then teaching other aid agencies that this is actually a way that you can reduce costs, and on average we’re talking about a 50% reduction in costs, you can help that many more people, you can build people’s resilience through this local training, possibly leading to new income generation or actually new livelihood for some people.
“In a lot of ways, this is what the fourth industrial revolution is all about. What we’re doing is applying a lot of those principles to aid work, essentially.”
It’s why three years on from the earthquake, Britton still leads a squad of six technical staff in Nepal. His team has been instrumental in the development of the Nepal Innovation Lab in Kathmandu Valley which is funded by World Vision International and works to find smarter, cheaper and better ways of providing humanitarian aid.
Central to that approach and Field Ready’s ambition to have a lasting impact on the country is the development of a 3D printing filament production capacity. This facility is looking to help expedite and localise the supply chain. It caters for a modest market, but one that is currently spending way over the odds, up to $60 on 1kg of filament, thanks to things like import taxes. The facility has a team dedicated to the production of commercial-standard ABS filaments, with PLA and other types of plastics potentially to come in the future, that cost around $6 to produce and $10-12 to buy. With supply of the raw materials not always straightforward, the filament development base is looking to recycle e-waste whenever it can, upcycling objects like printer housings from landfill that are valueless to anybody else.
While it will bring the cost down for the end user, it is also helping to educate Nepali people at the other end of the operation. Nepali, Britton believes, has a wealth of young and talented engineers, but they’re typically emigrating to places like the U.S. or Australia, so Field Ready is helping to fight this ‘brain drain’ by laying down foundations to enhance skills, and in turn, the local economy.
The thing with humanitarian crises is they’ll always keep happening. Global warming is going to see tropical cyclones become more intense, while tectonic plates can shift at any moment, and the ever-present pursuit of power will continue to see conflicts destroy communities. The troubles in Syria is one of the most topical examples of the latter, and yet Field Ready hasn’t hesitated to deploy members of its team in Eastern Europe and Western Asia to lend a hand and save lives. Using the same approach as in Nepal, Field Ready has cut the supply chain, used the resources at hand, and found solutions in harrowing scenarios, like people being trapped under the wreckage of bombings.
“We came up with airbags that are able to lift that heavy rubble. They tend to be very expensive pieces of kit, and they weren’t available in northern Syria, so we’ve made those with a huge reduction in cost, and completely locally using locally available materials, using basic things to bind pieces of rubber together,” James explains. “There’s no real high-tech exponential technology there, it was just basic engineering work but applied in a new way.”
Those heavy lift airbags are just 1.5cm thick, but when filled with pressurised air can lift up to 17 tonnes of weight – more than a JCB. There’s a plethora of other ways Field Ready finds solutions to critical problems – the wrist braces, cook stove, and airbags are just the tip of the iceberg. The team restores solar panels, sets up hydroponic farms, installs water pumps, manufacturers too many replacement parts to list, and even makes rat traps with just two plastic bottles, two twigs and some elastic bands. It’s all done locally, using local resources, with and for local people. Supply chains are concise, cost and wait-time reduced, and the latest manufacturing tools are brought to areas where they’ve scarcely been seen before.
“Part of our name, Field Ready, is about fielding new technologies in this humanitarian and development aid space, that would otherwise slowly trickle down from other areas – in other words, the best [developed] parts of the world would benefit first but not people in dire situations. That’s part of what we’re trying to do,” James concludes. “Applying things in a new way using design thinking to come up with some local solution that hasn’t been done before.
“When it comes to the airbag story, that’s directly saved people’s lives. To me that’s incredible. When we’re talking about restoring power to people in the Caribbean, that really hadn’t been done before as far as I know. There’s certainly been putting in solar panels as part of aid programs before but to actually repair them immediately following a hurricane, everybody should be doing this this way.”
Field Ready relies on a number of partners and donors to carry out the work it does, but also welcomes public donations which can be made via the Field Ready website.
