He Built a Windmill at 14 to Save His Village

In 2001, a severe famine swept through Malawi. Crops failed. Families starved. For William Kamkwamba, a 14-year-old from the village of Wimbe, the famine meant something else too: he could no longer go to school. His family could not afford the fees.

The Boy in the Library

With no school and no money, William spent his days at a local library. He found a book called Using Energy - an American textbook full of diagrams and illustrations. He could not read English fluently, so he used the diagrams as a guide: he would find a figure, track down the matching passage in the text, and translate it word by word using other books and the librarian's help. Slowly, he began to understand how a windmill worked.

Built From Nothing

William gathered what he could find at a local scrapyard: blue gum tree poles for the tower, a tractor fan blade for the rotor, a bicycle dynamo to generate current, PVC pipes, and scrap metal. He assembled everything by hand. When he raised a 16-foot windmill on his family's land, neighbours thought he had gone mad.

The Lights Come On

The windmill worked. It powered four lights and two radios in William's family home - the first electric light they had ever seen. Neighbours began arriving to charge their mobile phones. He built a second, taller windmill. Then a water pump that could irrigate crops, ending the hours of hand-watering his family had always relied on.

From Junkyard to the World Stage

In 2006, a Malawian newspaper ran a story on the windmill boy. The story spread online. William was invited to speak at TEDGlobal 2007 in Arusha, Tanzania - his first time on a plane, his first time leaving Malawi. The audience gave him a standing ovation. Venture capitalists in the crowd pledged to fund his education. He enrolled in secondary school five years after he had been forced to leave, and later graduated from Dartmouth College.

His memoir, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, was published in 2009. A Netflix film of the same name, directed by and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, followed in 2019. William co-founded the Moving Windmills Project in 2008, bringing clean water and solar power to communities across Malawi.