Could localised, distributed manufacturing techniques ever become commercially viable in a remote region like the Pacific?

An interview with Tom Coward, a Frontier Tech Pioneer

When something breaks in the Solomon Islands, the process of getting the parts to fix it is either long-winded, expensive or both.

The vast Pacific ocean is home to around 2.3m people who live in small communities, scattered across remote islands. For a family living on the edges of the Solomon Islands, getting parts to fix their fridge may mean taking a day’s boat ride to reach the capital city of Honiara, a city of just 70,000 people. If parts need to come from neighbouring cities like Brisbane, there’s a further 2-3 hour flight.

Anything local, like food, is very cheap, and anything imported, like a tap washer, is very expensive. There’s very little industry with which to make things on the islands themselves, so people rely on the few big boats that pull in from Australia and Asia on an increasingly infrequent basis.

The global shipping crisis makes importing from outside of the islands even harder. “We didn't have milk for four weeks in the capital,” Tom tells me. He’s the British High Commissioner Designate to the Solomon Islands and Nauru, and during his time in-post, has begun to experience first-hand the knock-on effects faced by marginal, remote economies like this one.

The implications for basic infrastructure on the islands are felt widely. It creates barriers for citizens to access healthcare, education and critical services like water and electricity.

“If there's a part out at the hospital, it takes weeks to get it in. If there's a part out with a car, it can take weeks to get in. That’s when you order it from Australia, which isn’t the cheapest market anyway. Otherwise, you're ordering it from Asia, and it's coming in on a very long voyage.”

In November 2021 Honiara saw riots break out as citizens attempted to storm the president’s residency. Buildings were set on fire and shops destroyed and looted. In the aftermath businesses faced waits of 4-5 weeks for parts and fixings needed to get their systems back up and running.

An international manufacturer on the island had two out of three of their machines out of action for months. They didn’t have the engineers around to do so, but engineers can be flown in on a plane in a matter of hours, while parts are loaded onto boats for long journeys at sea. Lucky for their business, they had the parts to fix the machines locally.

“I think what you've got in the Pacific is potentially a more difficult business case, but a more compelling one.” Tom says, with an excited glint in his eye as he begins to tell me about his idea.

3D printing, CNC milling and laser cutting are not new technologies, but using them in a remote location like the Solomon Islands presents a whole new frontier.

Digital manufacturing processes have already been proven to work in countries like Uganda, Kenya, and Fiji, and they have been proven to be run in a commercially viable way.

Using this technology to create items is not cheap, “but it’s immediate,” explains Tom, “and can be customised.” Access to parts means being able to get machines running again within 24 hours instead of 4-5 weeks. For the manufacturer, that’s the difference between stopping production and being able to maintain sales. For the patients at a hospital it could mean far more.

He already knows that using 3D printing for retail wouldn't work in this context". “It’s often too difficult to actually pay back your capital,” he says. In order to make this work across this network of islands, he’ll need commercial interest from all the key players.

“You need the beer company interested. You need the cigarette company interested. You need the power company and the hospital interested. You need the auto repair companies interested. You need enough of them interested to actually say, ‘would this viably run the business?’”

He’s already had conversations on the island which have revealed enthusiasm: the hospitals want to get machines repaired quicker. In the auto and manufacturing industries they would like to get parts quicker. “Of course, we would take them.” they all say. “There's no doubt about it: whether I have to wait months for a part to arrive from India, or days for a part that’s made locally, there's no question... other than how much.”

In the end it will come down to money, and how much value people will place on speed and customisation. A close friend Dom is a mechanic on the island and is confident that his clients would pay a premium to get their car running sooner. The project will kick off with market research covering the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Tonga, exploring the potential costs and value chains of the production of car parts or other in-demand industry spares. He’ll even be exploring whether reclaimed plastic pellets could be integrated into the system.

The commercial viability is at the core of this project. If Tom was approaching this problem from a humanitarian perspective, 3D printing may be an easier frontier in some ways (for example, some open-source printing designs for humanitarian items are available for free or for a reduced cost).

“I mean, if the question is: “can you bring in 3D printers for humanitarian work if the Australian Government pays for it?” Well, the answer is yes.”

The question here is whether you can set up a sustainable industry here that services the needs of these people, and whether the market exists to support it.

“It's not the individual bit of impact that excites me. It's the fact that it could commercially scale and therefore the development impact can just keep going.”

The problem of distance and an inability to overcome it is a long-standing problem. It’s difficult to have innovative business in the Solomon Islands because they’re so remote. Tom tells me about stories which were written about the region in economic reports decades earlier. “Some of the stuff could have been written 6 months ago, rather than 60 years ago, which is quite depressing.”

Taking new technologies and applying them to old problems is what excites Tom. He knows that quantum computing and VR aren’t necessarily going to help the Solomon Islands, and that deploying expensive, remote healthcare or brand new solar systems across the islands would probably have more impact. But this, as a short, agile, quick experiment might just make a positive dent in the lives of people living in the Solomon Islands.

As Tom says, “it's never going to change the world. But it might make a lot of things slightly better.”

If you’d like to dig in further…

👀 Follow this pilot’s journey on their pilot profile page (regularly updated)

🎧 Listen to John from Kijenzi tell two stories about what’s possible with 3D printing and distributed manufacturing in Kenya (4-minute listen)

🗺 Explore the pilot profile for 3D printing in post-disaster settings in Nepal. (short read)