The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

The buzz is building for the soon-to-be-released THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND – the inspirational true story about an enterprising teenager in Malawi who built a windmill from scraps found around his village and brought electricity--and a future—to himself and his family.

William Kamkwamba grew up poor in Malawi, Africa, a country suffering from AIDS and poverty. Like most in his village, his family struggled to survive as farmers and did not have access to electricity. The situation became all the more desperate in 2002, as Malawi experienced the worst famine in fifty years. William was 14 and his family could no longer afford his school’s $80-a-year tuition.

During this time William began thinking a lot about electricity, which only two percent of Malawians can afford. After discovering a book in a nearby library about windmills, he decided to build his own using scrap metal, tractor parts, and blue-gum trees, which grew near his village. William’s home-made contraption succeeded in supplying electricity to his family’s compound--enough for four lightbulbs and two radios! News of his invention spread, attracting many people across the world who offered to help him. Soon he was re-enrolled in school and traveling to the United States to visit wind farms, much like the ones he hopes to build across Africa. THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND tells the story of one boy’s struggle to advance himself from nothing, and his journey to inspire other Africans--and the whole world.

The following links are also helpful in learning more about William Kamkwamba and his forthcoming book, THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND.

WILLIAM'S BLOG: http://williamkamkwamba.typepad.com/
WILLIAM'S AUTHOR ASSISTANT PAGE: http://harpercollins.com/authors/35128/William_Kamkwamba/index.aspx
BRYAN MEALER'S AUTHOR ASSISTANT PAGE: http://www.harpercollins.com/author/index.aspx?authorID=35129
BROWSE INSIDE: http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061730320
MOVING WINDMILLS, William's Foundation: http://movingwindmills.org/
VIDEO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arD374MFk4w
 

-Virginia

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Scholar Robert. B. Reich considers leadership, management ability, and team-building as essential qualities of an entrepreneur. This concept has its origins in the work of Richard Cantillon in his Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (1755) and Jean-Baptiste Say (1803 or 1834)

in his Treatise on Political Economy.

A more generally held theory is that entrepreneurs emerge from the population on demand, from the combination of opportunities and people well-positioned to take advantage of them. An entrepreneur may perceive that they are among the few to recognize or be able to solve a problem. In this view, one studies on one side the distribution of information available to would-be entrepreneurs (see Austrian School economics) and on the other, how environmental factors (access to capital, competition, etc.), change the rate of a society's production of entrepreneurs.
A prominent theorist of the Austrian School in this regard is Joseph Schumpeter, who saw the entrepreneur as innovators and popularized the uses of the phrase creative destruction to describe his view of the role of entrepreneurs in changing business norms. Creative destruction dealt with the changes entrepreneurial activity makes every time a new process, product or company enters the market.