Change Maker: Case Study – Nathan Macabuag

If you need any more inspiration that you can be a Change Maker, look no further than former Change Makers student and Forbes 30 Under 30, Nate Macabuag.

In 2016, Nate completed our Global Village: Innovation Challenge module (then called Design for Sustainable Development). His team worked to design solutions for a community living in Bambui, Cameroon.

During Nate’s final year at Imperial in 2017-18, he got together with fellow student Ben Lakey to found a start-up company called Mitt Prosthetics. They had been drawn to try to solve the problem of creating lightweight, affordable prosthetics – many people (including children) around the world cannot access prosthetics at all – and even those that can, are often only offered old fashioned, poorly functioning and heavy prosthetics.

Nate and Ben saw a way to change that and began working to create that change in the real world.

Here you can read about how Nate and Ben used opportunities available to them through Imperial to start creating change.

They made great use of the Imperial Advanced Hackspace to prototype their design – read about that here.

In this interview (below), you can hear Nate and Ben reflecting on their journey up to 2019.

And you can hear the latest from Nate in this podcast episode from Black and Found.

Here is the link to Nate’s company website, now called Koalaa.

Last Updated 30th September 2023