GERLAB Builds Mongolia’s First Fab Lab

Transforming an Idea into a Movement

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What does it take to build a Fab Lab where there has never been one before? In Mongolia, the answer has been persistence, international collaboration, community support, and a team with a big vision for what digital fabrication can unlock. GERLAB, Mongolia’s first Fab Lab, is creating more than a place filled with machines. It is building a community around making, learning, entrepreneurship, and local problem-solving, while laying the groundwork for a broader maker movement across the country.

From MIT inspiration to Mongolia

The story behind GERLAB stretches back almost two decades. During a visit to MIT in 2008, the team’s supervisor Prof. Ganzorig, was introduced to the Fab Lab concept: an encounter that would eventually inspire a proposal to bring digital fabrication infrastructure to Mongolia. By 2020, the idea was beginning to take shape. The emerging team contacted the Fab Foundation for guidance on establishing a Fab Lab and began bringing together expertise from different fields.

Otgon-Ujin brought a background in nanotechnology engineering, and Maral had experience in Biology, Molecular biology to be specific, while May contributed experience in IT and marketing. Together with their team, they saw an opportunity to use digital fabrication not only for education, but also to strengthen Mongolia’s growing startup ecosystem and help more people turn ideas into products.

That vision eventually secured significant institutional support. Funded by the Mongolia-Japan Higher Engineering Education Development Project, a joint initiative between the Government of Mongolia and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). Today, GERLAB operates from the Ulaanbaatar Science and Technology Park, with a growing collection of digital fabrication and manufacturing tools, from laser cutters and CNC machines to 3D printers and other prototyping equipment. But getting the machines to Mongolia was only the beginning.

A community built the lab

Support came from across the international Fab Lab community, particularly through connections with the FabLab Asia Network. Training opportunities in Japan, visits and exchanges with Fab Labs across Asia, and hands-on guidance from experienced community members helped the team move forward. By the end of June, the team reported that approximately 95% of the lab’s equipment was operational.

Local participation was equally important. Community members came together to donate furniture and help renovate the facility, including graffiti art painting and supporting equipment installation.The result is a space that reflects one of the principles at the heart of the Fab Lab Network: knowledge can travel globally, but it becomes powerful when communities adapt it locally.

GERLAB Team

Mongolia meets the global Fab Lab Network

GERLAB’s development has already become an international story. Connections with Fab Labs and institutions in Japan, China, and the Czech Republic have opened doors for knowledge exchange and technical training. Support from the Czech Republic’s ambassador helped the team connect with Josef Průša and explore training opportunities for Mongolian students at the Technical University of Liberec.

In Japan, relationships with Skylab Workshop and Fab Lab Hamamatsu and other members of the FabLab Asia Network provided valuable support during equipment installation and helped connect GERLAB with a wider community of practitioners. Next, GERLAB plans to introduce Fab Academy, beginning with members of its core team and building the local expertise needed to eventually support more learners.

GERLAB Mongolia at FAN2025

Building sustainability through community

One example of GERLAB’s community-driven approach is the NomaTech Challenge: Problem to Prototype, an initiative that brought participants together to explore real environmental and local challenges facing Khentii Province and Mongolia and transform them into tangible solutions.

The journey began by understanding the problem first. Through orientation, team building, field visits, research, and conversations with local communities, participants investigated the issues that matter before moving into designing and prototyping possible responses. The challenge also connected this work to the broader environmental conversations surrounding UNCCD COP17, bringing global challenges into a distinctly local context. The team plans to make NomaTech an annual program, bringing together more global Fab Lab experts and local communities to co-create practical solutions to Mongolia’s challenges in their own context.

For GERLAB, NomaTech demonstrates what a Fab Lab can become beyond a place to access machines: a space where people investigate local needs, collaborate, experiment, and turn ideas into working prototypes with the potential to create meaningful impact.

GERLAB at UNCCD COP17 in Mongolia

The beginning of something bigger

GERLAB may be Mongolia’s first Fab Lab, but the team is already thinking beyond the first space. Plans and ambitions include expanding educational programs, strengthening partnerships with industry, developing smaller Fab Lab models for schools, introducing Fab Academy, growing opportunities for women and young makers, and connecting Mongolia more deeply with the global Fab Lab community.

At the same time, GERLAB is already growing beyond a digital fabrication space. The lab has successfully established itself as a local hub for assembling and delivering physics equipment, partnering with the Taiwanese company SF Scientific to produce and supply educational kits to primary and secondary schools across Mongolia. This represents a small but significant step toward building local capacity to manufacture, adapt, and deliver educational tools nationwide.

What began as an idea inspired by a visit to MIT has evolved into a growing community of makers in Mongolia and it has taken an international network to help make it possible. From JICA and government institutions to schools, companies, ambassadors, universities, Fab Labs, and individual makers, each relationship has contributed another piece.

And perhaps that is the most important part of GERLAB’s story:

A Fab Lab begins with machines, but the fab lab movement begins with people. GERLAB is showing how combining the two can create new pathways for learning, entrepreneurship, and locally driven innovation, and how one lab can inspire a much bigger vision for an entire country.

– Content in collaboration with GerLab Mongolia