Techfortrade was launched in early 2011 as a charity with a mission to alleviate poverty by acting as a catalyst for the development of new technology based solutions that address many of the barriers to trade for poor rural communities. These initiatives build on developments such as the emerging mobile phone based e-banking networks and on other innovations that potentially offer transformational social benefits. Our approach is to collaborate in order to develop sustainable social business models that can be deployed and localised in multiple markets.
With a number of social businesses already active on a small scale in this area, notably in Sub Saharan Africa, the concept is being tested through a targeted social investment programme. This combines the provision of financial capital with valuable capacity building support, the opportunity to share ideas with others working in a similar field, the potential to build a technology community beyond the companies supported, and also (helped by rigorous monitoring and evaluation) open the possibility of much larger investments from major funds.
techfortrade ran a recent contest for open source appropriate technology and 3-D printing. See also Ethical Filament Foundation.
Techfortrade Thunderhead Extruder
- Techfortrade Repository - https://github.com/TechforTrade
- Extruder Wiki - https://github.com/TechforTrade/Thunderhead-Filament-Extruder/wiki - Work in progress. The most complete parts are the build documentation which you can find links to on the right sidebar. STL, STEP and drawing PDF files should be in the BOMs for each major component.
- Grabcad - https://workbench.grabcad.com/workbench/projects/gcvN9Xsi01SW-lFGhJRj_-4vqndCMFAaoUt_-UQBdidnVn#/space/gc8b8c582LagITdwrMEId6wysTlJX_nukUvWoRwEQ_1f4U - This is where we keep our working CAD files.
- The Drying hopper code is located here: https://github.com/TechforTrade/Drying_Hopper