Anna Sera Lowe

Anna has always been fascinated by how things are made and how they get to the people who need them. As a manufacturing manager and later a supply chain consultant, she made a career of finding great excuses to visit manufacturing facilities around the globe; from multi-million dollar automated factories to informal waste-processing operations on dumps (sometimes next to each other) - and everything in between. She has consulted for clients as diverse as Johnson & Johnson, the state electricity monopoly of South Africa, and the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Over the last few years her interest has been caught by the Maker movement and ideas around grassroots innovation and distributed manufacturing networks. She co-founded Kumasi Hive in Ghana - a makerspace, innovation hub, and startup incubator. She mentors startups and is also a co-founder of MakerNet.global - a consortium that works on supporting local manufacturing and finding ways to help aid agencies to procure more of their needs from local manufacturers.