Event Information
Andrew is the Global Innovation Lead for Field Ready, a humanitarian innovation organisation that has focused on enabling local manufacturing of aid supplies in disaster responses. Andrew is systems and information engineer, former CEO of Engineers Without Borders UK and a current Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow. He has worked with a wide range of humanitarian innovation projects, donors and labs/incubators – and has a particular interest in scaling up innovations and aid sector systems change. Andrew is a board member of RedR and the Appropedia Foundation.
Particular innovations that Andrew is working on right now include manufacturing medical supplies in north-Western Syria, recycling plastic to make insulation for shelter winterisation, distributed mass production of essential WASH items like buckets and latrine slabs, mapping needs and manufacturing capabilities for provision of PPE to frontline workers in the COVID-19 response, sharing open hardware through ‘Humanitarian Making’ community of aid agencies and the emerging ‘Local Procurement Learning Partnership’ initiative.
We will also be joined by Usamah Shamma for this spotlight lecture. He attended school in Aleppo and earned his University degree in Mechanical Engineering. Until the onset of the Syrian Civil War, he lived and worked in Aleppo, obtaining a variety of jobs. These included packing machine maintenance, making factories' horizontal lifters and hydraulic pistons and consulting for rescue and firefighting equipment. He is currently busy repairing hospitals in Syria.