William was 14 when hunger forced his family to pull him out of school.
In Malawi, in 2001, that could have meant the end of any dream. But he kept going to his village library, and there he found a book with a picture of a windmill on the cover. He did not understand English very well, so he stared at the diagrams until he memorized them.
Using a broken bicycle, tree poles, PVC pipe, and pure scrap, he built his own windmill. The first electricity his family saw lighting up their home came from it. Later, he built a larger one to pump water and irrigate the crops of the entire village.
Journalists found him, he spoke at TED, and he ended up studying at Dartmouth. It all began with an image that almost no one else stopped to look at twice.