Jeremy: May 2008 Archives

I spent a week in Malawi recently with Nick (SolarAid's Director): my first fieldwork for SolarAid. Bottom line is you'd be thrilled. In that week, I saw on the one hand how difficult things can be, but also learned that the opportunity to help and make a big difference - huge as I thought it was - is bigger, indeed just vast.

First some impressions of the country and the people. I knew Malawi was going to be poor, but I didn't know quite how poor. As you drive around, you can easily sense how close the people live to disaster.

There is no real functional economy. A few big companies do sugar or whatever, then there are vanishingly few mid size or even small companies between the elite and the masses of subsistence farmers. This is the result of decades of post-colonial corruption. A gent called Hastings Banda pillaged the place to fill his bank accounts, and northern multinationals aided and abetted him as ever. But the subsistence farmers make do, and you see maize, cassava, groundnuts lapping up to the doors of the huts everywhere. You don't see many livestock, and there are children just everywhere: thousands and thousands of children.

Despite all this manifest poverty, you see very, very many smiling faces, and hear plenty to keep hope alive. The schools do their best. Even the poorest speak English passably to well.

Two anecdotes. We met a teacher, Mary, in Nkhata Bay. She teaches classes of over a hundred in the local school, in two shifts a day. She invited us to her hut, where we heard all about the challenges in detail and saw her indomitable spirit shine through them. There are also opportunities.

We met a lad called William Kamkwamba, now nineteen. Aged fourteen, living in a rural hamlet of typical red-mud brick huts miles with tin roofs in the middle of nowhere, he went to a school like Mary's and learned about electricity. He decided he wanted to make some of that for his family, so they could see at night, and run a television. He went to the library, read about wind power, and decided he'd make one of those turbine things. He got some bamboo poles, some old metal to make blades, a bicycle frame and chain to run a dynamo. he wired it all up to a box of batteries and ....bingo.... light at night. Have a look at this photo:

We went to his hamlet, saw the turbine, kicked the tyres. We'd have hired him on the spot, but some American philanthropist had heard all this before, and is packing him off all-expenses paid to university in South Africa (plus solar powering the whole hamlet). SolarAid's national co-ordinator, Fiskani, is another example. He gives the impression his folks must be teachers or government officials, but they're not: they are subsistence farmers. Here's to education, and the Mary's of the world. Plus the lights at night to help do it.

If you want to watch a short video about William, go here:

More about the trip in my next blog entry!
Jeremy Leggett, Chairman