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Malawi, in East Africa

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To power Malawi in a drought to get water and elecricty.

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When William Kamkwamba was 14, he built a windmill in Malawi to generate electricity and pump water for his family. Now he's a Dartmouth grad inspiring thousands of innovators.

In 2002, Malawi faced what the BBC called its " worst-ever " famine.

Stemming from an extreme drought, the famine left more than three-quarters of the landlocked southeast African country's population " on the verge of starvation " (to quote the BBC) - seven million people were seriously affected.

Enter William Kamkwamba, a 14-year-old boy whose family couldn't afford his $80 annual tuition during the famine. Thirsty for knowledge and desperate to make life better for his family and his fellow Malawians, the young man started visiting his local library. It was there that he learned about bicycle dynamo systems - basically bike headlights that run on pedal power. This sparked an idea in him, one that grew into a full-blown aspiration when he saw a photo of a windmill in a library book.

After scouring trash heaps for parts, he started tinkering with designs. They included bicycle components, a fan blade from an old tractor, plastic piping, and more unglamorous materials. Met with skepticism from his community, he hid his true intentions, saying that he was "only making something for juju," using the word for a magic spell in traditional West African religious systems. This seemed to satisfy his neighbors.

After many tweaks (and many electrical shocks), Kamkwamba used the strange-looking 16-foot-tall windmill first to power a small lightbulb, and later to send electricity to his family's mud-brick home. Soon, the BBC notes, members of his community were lined up to charge their cellphones (only 2 percent of Malawi's population has access to in-home electricity).

In the years since, Kamkwamba has built even more (and increasingly complex) windmills, water pumps, and other solar- and wind-powered devices. He's been on television, given a TED Talk, written a book, been the subject of a documentary, and graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in environmental studies and a minor in engineering. And he's not yet 30. Kamkwamba illustrates just how consequential a great idea, executed well, can be.

Are you interested in improvement, entrepreneurship, and STEM? Use the Noodle college search tool to find the schools that will help you take your ideas to the next level.

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When William Kamkwamba was 14, he built a windmill in Malawi to generate electricity and pump water for his family. Now he's a Dartmouth grad inspiring thousands of innovators. In 2002, Malawi faced what the BBC called its " worst-ever " famine.

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The capital is Lilongwe, which is also the biggest city.

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Location

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Use

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Impact

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It saved money in multiple families

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In the text it states that William said his family finally has lights and running water.

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At my high school we've been learning about "indicators," so I want to share a good one for the problem of deforestation in my native Malawi: by this time next year, my mother will have spent 1,095 hours looking for firewood just so my family can eat.

That's three hours per day spent walking to the nearest blue gum grove, a walk that only gets longer each year. This is in central Malawi, near the city of Kasungu, and my mother is not alone. In most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, over 90 percent of people are without electricity and use firewood for cooking and heating. In Malawi, that number is even greater.

My grandpa tells me how thick forests once covered our entire country, so dense and dark that a man could lose his sense of time and direction in them. Those forests have now been reduced by more than 80 percent, and the results may spell doom for us all. Malawi loses more than 200 miles of forests each year, most cut down illegally by men without jobs who sell it on the roadside as firewood. The big tobacco estates in Malawi also use the wood to flu-cure the leaves for auction. Even the small-plot tobacco farmers, such as my father, must take trees to build shelters for drying leaves. Because of termites, these shelters never last longer than a season.

As many know, trees work like big pumping machines, sucking up the water from the earth and releasing it into the atmosphere, where it returns in the form of rain. Without the trees, this rainmaking is halted. And when there is rain, nothing is left to catch it, so it simply washes into the rivers, along with the precious topsoil and fertilizer from our maize fields, which we depend on to provide our food.

For the lucky few in Malawi, electricity comes from hydro plants on the Shire River. So when the floods take our topsoil into the river, they also carry tons of garbage and silt - clogging up the dams and shutting down the plants. The power plants must stop all operations and dredge the river, which in turn causes power cuts. And because this process is so expensive, the power companies must charge extra for electricity, making it even more difficult to afford.

This cycle caused severe droughts in 2000 and 2005, both of which led to famines. The first killed nearly ten thousand people and nearly took my own family. We lived for months on one meal per day and dropped down to nothing. During this time I was also forced to drop out of school because my father couldn't pay my fees. However, I managed to continue my education at a small local library funded by the Americans. There, I fell in love with science books and managed to teach myself about how motors and electricity worked. Another book featured windmills on the cover, and said they were used to pump water and generate power.

I was so inspired I began collecting scrap metal and old bicycle and tractor pieces and managed to build a windmill of my own, one that powered four light bulbs. Another pumped water for irrigation. (You can read the whole story in my new book " The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," which I wrote with Bryan Mealer.)

News of my windmill spread around the world, and thanks to the book and some generous well-wishers, I was be able to return to school and make much-needed improvements to my village, such as install solar panels and drill a borehole for clean drinking water. For the first time, my family has lights and running water. But I still haven't solved the problem of firewood. Each day, my mother has no choice but to walk all those miles to collect a handful of wood. Recently I've tinkered with some alternatives: an experiment to create biogas out of goat's poop was just disastrous and nearly destroyed my mother's kitchen. But a plan for a tin-foil solar oven is still ongoing. I hope it works.

So in the meantime, I'm taking a more basic approach: planting more trees. Through my foundation, The Moving Windmills Project, one of my goals is to reforest my district, along with designing simple methods of bringing wind power and irrigation to Malawi's villages. If I can manage this, and finally perfect that solar oven (never mind the goat's poop), perhaps one day we can enjoy the forests the way grandpa remembered.

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Planting Trees and Moving Windmills in Malawi

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At my high school we've been learning about "indicators," so I want to share a good one for the problem of deforestation in my native Malawi: by this time next year, my mother will have spent 1,095 hours looking for firewood just so my family can eat.

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The windmills generate electricity and pump water into their hometown.

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Malawian boy uses wind to power hope, electrify village - CNN.com

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William Kamkwamba dreamed of powering his village with the only resource that was freely available to him.

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The languages are English

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Their currency is Malawian Kwacha

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Before Malawi was a country it was known as Nyasaland

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They were helpful for them and saved people from not having electricity.

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Pictures