Giving Compass' Take:

• Fast Company profiles Field Ready, a San Francisco nonprofit that tries to come up with innovative solutions to dire problems in conflict regions, such as 3D-printing medical supplies for short-handed health workers.

• Field Ready serves as a good model for aid organizations looking to make the most of their resources and investing in human capital to help save lives.

• Here's why the health response in Syria needs to be focused on the immunization of children.

In Syria, as bombs continue to fall in that country’s seven-year civil war and descent into hell, there’s a man in a cave, working his ass off to try to cobble together on-the-fly fixes to broken medical equipment. Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes he’s stumped by stupid problems–like not being able to find a service person willing to come and update the firmware on a two-year-old ultrasound machine that’s otherwise in great shape.

Usamah — it’s best not to use his full name, for obvious reasons, given that he’s MacGyvering solutions on behalf of suffering people on the receiving end of relentless attacks by the brutal Assad regime — is Our Man in Syria for Field Ready, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that aims to come up with novel, inexpensive, and practical solutions to really dire problems on the ground in war and natural disaster zones.

Field Ready was founded by Dara Dotz, an expert in 3D printing with a history of humanitarian work in places like Haiti, and Eric James, a veteran of two decades of leading disaster relief around the world. To date, the nonprofit has done work in 17 to 19 countries — “it just depends on how many islands you want to count,” Dotz says — including places like Nepal, South Sudan, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, East Timor, Haiti, and Colombia.

Read the full article about the nonprofit addressing difficult problems in war zones by Daniel Terdiman at fastcompany.com.