222 15. High-stake conditions to catalyse local sustainable development through Fablabs in Africa Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou INTRODUCTION With the help of the Internet, information circulates instantaneously from one end of the world to the other, offering the possibility to exchange, share and contribute to the enrichment of knowledge. This Web 2.0 trend has paved the way for the exploitation of information for personal or community purposes, within citizen spaces for reflection, creation and innovation. In consequence, digital technologies are reconfiguring territories, facilitating debate in the public arena and imposing new forms of collaboration between the various actors in society. This contributes to providing citizens with knowledge through research and education, to providing answers adapted to the real needs of society, to offering services to marginalised/ disadvantaged and/or disempowered groups of people, to discovering new avenues of research by reformulating society’s needs into research problems, and to proposing research results that are locally relevant. In other terms, digital technologies are strengthening the science-society mediation mechanisms. The maker movement through spaces like Fabrication Laboratory (Fablab) is part of this mediation. Fablabs are collaborative spaces for the rapid prototyping of physical objects, where machine tools and computers are made available to users to carry out projects individually or collectively through digital design and manufacture (Bouvier-Patron, 2015, p. 177; Buclet, 2015, p. 45). Fablabs were created with the ambition to contribute to the democratisation of technological design and thus to allow each of us to become an inventor through the mastery of personal digital fabrication (Lallement, 2015). Often described in a virtuous way as agents of social change, vectors of the third and fourth industrial revolutions, with the promise of enormous and rapid economic benefits; Fablabs are therefore designed to facilitate access to technology, to enable any community to become more creative. Africa has not been left out of the charm of this fine discourse. Indeed, the first Fablab in Africa was created in Ghana in 2002 with financial support from MIT (Bosqué, 2016). With the first Fablab created at the MIT, then diffused in the rest of the world, it is interesting to raise the question of whether these spaces are really appropriate technologies for the African continent and especially for its development. This chapter aims to answer this question and it is organised into three main sections. The first section presents the fundamentals that govern the maker movement. Based on decolonial studies, the next section proposes the risks associated with technocoloniality. The third section lays the foundations of the type of development to which appropriate technologies must con- tribute. The whole approach of this chapter is based on endogenous and authentic data, coming from research fields on Fablabs in Africa.