1987– 
INVENTOR AND ENGINEER MALAWI (AFRICA)
This exquisite tale strips life down to its barest essentials, and once there finds reason for hopes and dreams.
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY REVIEW OF THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND: CREATING CURRENTS OF ELECTRICITY AND HOPE BY WILLIAM KAMKWAMBA AND BRYAN MEALER
William had collected all the parts he needed and assembled them according to the diagram. The book said you could create electricity using a windmill, and that was exactly what William, age fourteen, intended to do. His family, like most families in Malawi, didn’t have access to electricity, so he was determined. But no matter how much care and attention he’d taken in figuring out the words around the diagram—no matter how long it had taken him to find the parts he needed at the local junkyard—none of it would work if William couldn’t get his hands on a bicycle dynamo.
What was worse, everyone thought he was crazy—even his mom! No one had ever seen the kind of windmill he was talking about, and if such a thing existed, they didn’t believe he could build one using wood from local gum trees and items like an old, cast-off tractor fan and a bicycle frame.
William had dropped out of class that year, and the junkyard was right across from his old school. His former classmates had seen him digging through the trash and called out, “There’s Kamkwamba, playing in the garbage again!” To him, all the pieces of old machinery, PVC tubes, and wires were a kind of treasure. To everyone else, they were junk. His mom worried that a boy who spent so much time digging through the garbage would never be able to find a wife.
William was walking down a road in the village with his cousin, Gilbert, when a bike sped past them. “Look!” said Gilbert. Attached to the back of this bike was the bicycle dynamo William had been looking for.
In a country like Malawi where bicycles are a common mode of transportation and electricity is scarce, these bicycle dynamos were a common sight—but they were still too expensive for the son of a poor farmer to purchase. Every time William saw one, he felt a little tortured.
But William’s cousin Gilbert was the son of the local chief, and he had some pocket money on him. Gilbert ran up ahead to the bicyclist and offered him 500 kwacha (about $1.50 in US dollars) for that bicycle dynamo. It wasn’t much, but the country was just coming through some tough economic times and jobs were still scarce, so the bicyclist didn’t want to turn the money down. He took the cash from Gilbert, and Gilbert handed the bicycle dynamo to William.
By the time everything was in place, a large crowd had gathered. William could hear them as he stood high on the tower of the windmill he’d built; he recognized some of their faces as people who’d called him crazy. Reaching out, he grasped the two wires dangling from the heart of the machine and knotted their two ends together. He removed the piece of metal that kept the windmill’s blades from turning, and then he clambered back down to the ground.
There he held a light bulb attached to one of the wires from the windmill. A breeze picked up, and the crowd hushed as the light bulb lit up—a flicker at first, but then a warm, steady glow.
“It’s true!” said one person.
“Yes,” said another, “the boy has done it.”
Born in 1987 in Wimbe, Malawi, in Africa, William Kamkwamba is the eldest of seven siblings, and the only boy. Growing up, he got picked on by other boys at school because he didn’t have an older brother to protect him, but he didn’t let that get in the way of his studies. He did so well in junior high that he earned the right go on to high school—which is not free in Malawi, the way it is in the United States.
A bicycle dynamo is a small electrical generator that attaches to the wheel of a bicycle. Using basic electromagnetic principles, this generator transforms the motion of a moving bicycle tire into electricity, which is then used to power a headlamp on the front of the bike.
Unfortunately, when William was fourteen, his country was struck by a severe drought. This meant that his family no longer had the money it needed to send him to high school—in fact, they barely had enough to eat.
Like 80 percent of people in Malawi, William’s family grew maize, or corn, which they prepared into a staple food called nsima. When the rains didn’t come that year, his family’s crops failed, producing just three bags of maize. In order to make those supplies last the whole year for the whole family, they ate only one meal a day, consisting of just three mouthfuls of nsima. Sometimes William’s father went without his meal so there would be more food for the children.
William decided to stay current on his classmates’ schoolwork so that when his family had the money to send him to school again, he wouldn’t be behind. This was when he turned to his school library, where he discovered Using Energy. This book showed diagrams explaining how windmills could be used to produce electricity and to pump water. The ability to pump water, for William, meant that he could bring irrigation to his family’s farm, protecting them from future droughts. But first, William decided that he would learn how to produce electricity.
With the help of the school librarian, William figured out the parts he needed—and, in the process, taught himself not just his first words of English, but the basic principles of electromagnetics. William finished his first windmill in 2002, lighting up first one light bulb, then four, with homemade switches he made from PVC plastic. He even built a circuit breaker, using a magnet, modeled after an electric bell.
People came from miles around to see if the rumors they’d heard were true, and word began to spread about the boy who’d harnessed the wind. The Daily Times in Blantyre, the commercial capital of Malawi, wrote a story on Kamkwamba’s windmill in November 2006, and the story was picked up by a blog site called Hacktivate. From there, it caught the attention of Emeka Okafor, program director for the TED Global Conference. Okafor invited William to fly to Arusha, Tanzania, for a TED Global event, during which audience members heard William’s story and offered to help him fulfill his dreams of going back to school and building a second windmill for his family.
High school tuition in Malawi runs around $80 a year, in US dollars.
William went on to complete high school where he grew up and then to attend the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa. He built a bigger windmill, as he’d intended, to pump water for his family’s farm, as well as a solar pump for a second, deeper well in his village that currently supplies water for six community taps.
William started a nonprofit organization called the Moving Windmills Project, which is dedicated to bringing community projects like the solar water pump system he created for his village to other villages in Malawi and beyond. He also wrote a book with American journalist Bryan Mealer called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, and is the subject of a documentary video.
In 2010, William became one of four recipients of the GO Ingenuity Award, a prize awarded by the Santa Monica-based nonprofit GO Campaign. With the grant, Kamkwamba will hold workshops for youth in his home village, teaching them how to make windmills and repair water pumps.
Currently, William attends Dartmouth College in New Hampshire for engineering.
The way I would rock the world is in the field of engineering. The way that would have an effect on people is by my dream to help make transportation safer. I would install air bags for all passengers on trains, planes, and any other kind of transportation. Also I would add an automatic safety latch on the seat belts for school buses that get into severe crashes.
MARK GRASLE 
AGE 14