It’s 17:45 at Bellville station in the eastern suburbs of Cape Town. I stand waiting for a train, the same one I’ve been taking three days a week. I’m waiting for a church train.

The locomotive rushes into the platform, and gospel hits my ear from one of its carriages.

I’ve had the privilege of being part of an unfolding maker movement in Africa. Here, we’re shining a spotlight on some of the continent’s great practical innovation with these highlights from this year’s Maker Faire in Lagos, Nigeria.

Whit Alexander worked for Microsoft, helped develop the maps for the first Encarta encyclopedia, and created the best-selling board game Cranium. He’s now the founder and CEO of Burro, based in Koforidua, Ghana. Burro is a for-profit company providing innovative products like batteries, irrigation pumps, and eyeglasses to low-income families [...]

Recently we visited the office of an old friend at a young Silicon Valley start-up. It didn’t take long to spot the first pirate flag—the skull and bones banner that has come to symbolize the renegade attitude of the Valley’s tech disruptors. It started with Steve Jobs’s maxim, delivered at [...]

Makeshift contributors What Took You So Long followed Mobius Motors on their quest to take on Mobility, Africa-style. The idea behind Mobius is simple: design a vehicle for and by Kenyans. But the implementation is far more complex. Watch Mobius’s founder and mechanics discuss their grand design challenge: devising a [...]

No signs marked the entrance to the Mad Max weapons factory on the outskirts of Misrata; it was just an old garage with bare concrete walls. A bookshelf full of manuals for farm equipment stood near the door of the cavernous hall, serving as dusty reminders of better days, when mechanics focused their energies on maintaining a well oiled agricultural [...]

Makeshift is reporting live from TEDGlobal 2012 with five questions for Professor Vikram Patel. Born in India and trained in the UK in the underfunded field of mental health, Dr. Vikram Patel is no stranger to resource constraints. But when he began a two-year post in Zimbabwe, he found himself utterly unequipped. [...]

Makeshift is excited to announce the launch of our first video series, Manufactured, about people and their craft. As a follow-up to Philippa Young’s article ”Seeing through Scrap” from the Re-culture Issue, we visited Cyrus Kabiru’s studio in Nairobi, Kenya to give you a more intimate look at his work. Thanks to filmographer [...]

Organic growth is the goal of any economy. Regrettably, such development is lacking in certain parts of the world. In an effort to fill this void, many well-meaning individuals seek to provide impoverished areas with in-kind donations—goods and services given freely which could be given cash values. This may seem [...]