Africa Fab Lab does not invent these designs. We find methods that builder communities have already developed, argued over and proved in the field, and we write them up as clear build steps with local costs and honest safety notes. Every project page links back to its source. If you plan to build, read the original documentation too — it usually holds detail we could not fit.
Permaculture, rocket stoves and natural building forums
A long-running builder forum where rocket stove and natural building designs are argued out, built, burned, measured and revised in public. Much of the practical combustion knowledge in our Energy & Cooking section traces back to threads there.
Open wiki of appropriate technology and sustainability
The largest open library of appropriate-technology documentation, with construction manuals, sizing tables and field reports contributed by practitioners and university teams worldwide. Content is openly licensed for reuse with attribution.
Open hardware machine plans, including the CEB press
Publishes complete, dimensioned build plans for machines including the compressed earth block press, on the principle that anyone should be able to build their own tools from local materials rather than importing them.
Field-tested engineering for community projects
Chapter projects produce engineering drawings and field reports for water, sanitation and small-machine projects, including briquette press work documented in detail by volunteer engineers such as Lee Hite.
Detailed briquette press engineering write-ups
A hands-on engineering site with thoroughly documented briquette press work: press forces, binder ratios, drying behaviour and the failures along the way — the kind of detail most project write-ups leave out.
Technical briefs for low-income contexts
Publishes concise technical briefs on water storage, sanitation and small enterprise technology, grounded in decades of implementation work across Africa and South Asia.
External designs remain the work of their original authors and communities. We claim no authorship over them. Our own contribution is the curation, the build-step write-ups and the local cost and adaptation notes.
Where a source is openly licensed — Appropedia and Open Source Ecology publish under open licences — we reuse with attribution and a link. If you are a rights holder and we have credited you incorrectly or reused something you would rather we did not, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
Builder submissions stay credited to the builder, with their name and location shown on the project page.
Every photo on this site comes from one of these libraries under a Creative Commons or public domain licence, with the photographer credited on the plan page. Where none of them held a usable build photo, we drew a labelled technical illustration instead and marked it as a diagram. Photos and diagrams both follow one house rule: they show the build itself, or African builders' hands — never visiting outsiders posed over the work.
Our main source. Deep coverage of African appropriate technology through the SuSanA, GIZ, ILRI, CIAT and Practical Action donations. Category trees such as Appropriate technology in Africa and Rainwater harvesting are the fastest way in.
CC BY / CC BY-SA / CC0 / public domain
The largest wiki of appropriate-technology build documentation, much of it written by field practitioners and university design teams. Text and images are reusable with attribution.
CC BY-SA 4.0
Sustainable Sanitation Alliance photo sets: latrines, tippy taps, biogas digesters, faecal sludge handling, mostly shot in East and West Africa with location captions.
CC BY 2.0
Livestock, fodder, grain storage and smallholder farming imagery across Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mali and Nigeria. Consistently well captioned.
CC BY-NC-SA / CC BY 2.0
Technical briefs on briquetting, micro-hydro, stoves and water lifting, with photographs of the builds they describe. Some material is licence-restricted — check per item.
Mixed, mostly CC BY-NC-SA
Vetted product and build library with specifications, cost bands and field performance data. Strongest for water treatment, pumps and cooking.
Mixed — attribution required
The origin of several eco-briquette and biomass fuel plans on this site: dimensioned lever-press drawings, moisture and binder ratios, and field results from Engineers Without Borders deployments.
Free to reuse for non-commercial development work
Full CAD and fabrication documentation for the Global Village Construction Set, including the CEB press this site's block plans build on.
CC BY-SA / open hardware
Water and sanitation technology wiki: sand dams, rope pumps, rainwater harvesting, spring protection, with construction sketches and photos.
CC BY-SA 3.0
Open-source biochar water filtration plans and detailed kiln and filter construction manuals, field-proven in low-resource settings.
CC BY-NC-SA
Useful for step-sequence structure and comparison, but its own drawings are not openly licensed for reuse, so we take no images from it — only formatting inspiration.
Not reusable — reference only
