Nepal Communitere

If there is one characteristic of the Nepal Communitere to be remembered, it is the variety of the users.

Around 50 members are using the space on a daily basis. The co-working spaces are rented by NGOs to organize team building and training workshops. But the Makerspace is commonly used by the Robotics Association of Nepal (RAN) to prototype their products and organize their workshops. A group of rural Nepali women is using the machines to learn how to manufacture carpentry products in order to develop their own business. We can also meet local artists using the space for installations.

Other users are those attending workshops. The recurrent ones are from RAN and a specific project (Miss-Tech) promoting robotics and making to women, too few are studying these topics in Nepal.

Most of these discovered and joined the place thanks to word-of-mouth. A big part of awareness has been played by the RAN, who brought a lot of engineering students at Nepal Communitere. According to Bahar, they come back because this place is made to “get dirty”, meaning that here people have all the space and tools to make things.

For the daily members, Nepal Communitere is mostly seen has a family. People naturally get involved in the life of the lab, take initiatives from organizing lunch for the all team, to improving the makerspace area, building new machines…

Originally Nepal Communitere has been funded through an initial investment of 100 K$ financed by the organization. Most of this budget had to be used to fix the buildings after the earthquake… The rest was used to buy machines and tools for the makerspace.

Today, most of the revenues (60 K$/year) are coming from the co-working space (50%), workshops (25%) - with a variable “cost per head” to allow any workshop to happen even if the number of students is low – and makerspace access, and space renting for events (25%).

The revenues are barely covering the costs, divided into rent (40%), salaries (20%) and utilities (40%).

In the near future, the team hopes to be able to develop new activities such as a repair café, or develop the “fab café” activity to increase revenues. They are also working on a partnership with Field Ready to start a 3D printing manufacture focusing on humanitarian products. Women will run the manufacture, in order to start to engage more Nepali women in technology.

The mains goals on the short-term are to finish to fix the infrastructure, hire more people to decrease the share of volunteers (who can’t be full time), and start a training program on entrepreneurship for the members.

First thing to remember, today, Nepal Communitere is a model under construction. Today, 5 volunteers (including Bahar) are working at Communitere (local and international) to help to structure the activities and start a monitoring process for the projects and innovators. 3 people are in charge of the daily operations (running the makerspace, kitchen, co-working space…).

Some volunteers are working on specific projects, like Pedi cab: a modernized rickshaw, designed by a firm in California to be manufactured in Nepal. They are prototyped here and part of it will be produced in Kathmandu valley.

If there is no detailed process to accompany the projects yet, some workshops are already in place to help the innovators. Mostly on 3D printing, manufacturing… Due to the current team, the workshops are ran by the RAN organization; Nepal Communitere provides space and tools.

In order to provide support to their members, they let them use the space to organize their own events or exhibitions. Hence RAN has already organized gathering events for their students and several artists set up exhibitions, free of charge.

Today, the biggest asset of Nepal Communitere remains the local and international network they are building. They organize weekly meetings to gather their innovators, but also build strong partnerships with other organizations like Field Ready or the US Ambassy to co-organize events.

Today, the number 1 priority of Nepal Communitere is to create a space valuable for users, providing machines, tools and support to use them. Due to the current structure, the team didn’t have the time to set up a documentation program yet. They try to use their network and connect their members with other organizations to help them monitoring and documenting their projects, until the time they will be ready.

The life of the lab is documented on social networks, which is more linked to communication on the events and projects advancements.

In the future, Nepal Communitere aims at playing the role of incubator for social innovators and will work on a structural process to help them document their projects. They see it as a real need to allow scalability of the products and services created in the lab.