For just about a decade—since she was 15 years old—the brunt of Maggie Grout’s time has been spent rounding up funds and materials to build schools in underserved areas through her nonprofit, Thinking Huts. But raising the actual walls of a classroom only takes about 18 hours.
The young founder has an aptly modern approach to addressing an age-old global crisis: she 3D- prints schools. Though partnership requests come from all over the world, Grout’s research showed that the need for accessible education was greatest in East Africa. She’s currently zeroed in on Madagascar, where her team received the most enthusiasm for the project. The finished spaces each have a capacity of approximately 35 students. They serve as venues for community and after-school programming in addition to being classroom settings, expanding the impact from school-age children to all demographics within an area.
To print the Thinking Huts, a cement mixture is extruded layer by layer in under a day—though the roofs, which are timber and handcrafted, add on another couple of weeks. “People ask why we don’t just 3D-print the whole school, but the nice thing about this hybrid structure is that we’re still involving artisans. That was a concern in the beginning,” Grout tells AD. “With innovation, you need to take it more gradually.” The strategy gives Thinking Huts the opportunity to make the most of the locals’ skills. For instance, many residents of the Malagasy city of Ambositra are trained as wood-carvers and were hired to make the classroom doors for her latest project. “In these towns where they practice a craft, we can blend traditional skills with this very cutting-edge technological approach, which I think makes it unique.”
Though the number of Africa’s out-of-school primary-age children has decreased in the past two decades—halving from 35% in 2000 to 17% in 2019, according to UNICEF—a staggering 98 million youths are still going without an education in the region. Per UNESCO, sub-Saharan Africa has the highest global rates of education exclusion. Reflecting on the alternate paths her own life might have taken without education is what ignited Grout’s passion for schooling-related advocacy work. Born in a rural Chinese village, she was abandoned and placed into an orphanage before being adopted and raised in the US.
“Coming from those rural origins, and then spending most my life in the US and seeing how many opportunities I had because of my access to education here, is really what solidified my desire to pursue philanthropy,” she says. High school seemed as good a time as any to start investing in the cause. Thinking Huts was officially approved for 501(c)(3) status in 2016, when Grout was 16. “I thought to myself, I could do [philanthropy] as a career, even if it might take a bit longer. It’s easy to see, even from something like watching the Olympics recently, that you have to start out so young to get anything off the ground.”
The printing itself is a cinch, but the groundwork has been a heavy lift. After pouring herself into the organization for about seven years, Grout opened the doors to Thinking Huts’ first school in April 2022. Her sights are now set on building a complex of classrooms she’s dubbed a Honeycomb campus, projected to welcome students in summer 2025. Three structures on adjoining hexagonal bases are currently in place as the foundation, and the concept is that with increased enrollment, the footprint is easily expanded. “A lot of times, the nearest school is two or three hours away, and it’s overcrowded, so the children can’t enroll if there’s not space,” Grout says. The students of the Honeycomb campus will largely be children who haven’t had the opportunity to pursue any formal schooling before, as it’s situated in a very remote locale.
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The Honeycomb campus’s clever name is a fit for its structure, but the bee association is by design; an apian motif buzzes throughout the organization. Grout’s team refers to the printer as the Queen Bee, and to Thinking Huts’ donors as the Hive. Designer Gabriela Hearst and singer Daniel Caesar are among her growing group of supporters, and Grout is currently courting NBA Africa for a partnership. “I think people see the scalability—it’s just a matter of presenting clear, attainable goals,” she says. Like a hive in the wild, she hopes to build strength in numbers.
“I love the sense of family and community implied by the beehive symbolism—that’s what we we’re really trying to [communicate] in our work too,” she says. “Education has ripple effects within families and communities. You’re serving more than just the students.”
