William Kamkwamba's Malawi Windmill Blog

William Kamkwamba's Malawi Windmill Blog is amazing:

Our family is poor like many families in Malawi and Africa, and as a result, we have no electricity in our village or my home. For many years we had only paraffin candles to light my home at night. They are expensive, smoky, smelly and have to be purchased about 8 km from home.

During that time I decided to try to get as much education as possible by reading as many books as I could find. An organization called the Malawian Teacher Training Activity (MTTA), a project of USAID contributed a large quantity of books to the primary school library near my home. I read many of them. One of the books I read was called Using Energy, a primary school textbook about how energy is made. Inside the book there were plans for a windmill. I decided to build a windmill to provide power for my family.

My problem was that I didn't have much money to buy parts to construct the windmill. Over time, I found materials that had been discarded by other farmers or by the nearby tobacco plantations, and I bought a few parts with money I scraped together:

500 Kwacha (Malawian currency) or $2.75 (US $1=145 Kwacha) for two bearings.

500 Kwacha for a bicycle dynamo (the kind that powers a bike's light when you ride the bike.)

400 Kwacha for a fan belt

800 Kwacha for a bicycle frame