$28 Peanut Hero Creates Sustainable Sheller
How many heroes can create a revolutionary gadget that has changed the lives of poor farmers and costs only $28 and refuses to get rich from it? In the life of Jock Brandis, just a cursory look at the bloody fingers of women peanut shellers in an impoverished village in Africa is all it took to create the universal nut sheller from locally available sustainable materials.
A Canadian of Dutch descent, he has since passed on the skill to local farmers in Mali, where he first presented his model, and elsewhere on the continent where he trains them for free and still refuses to patent the cheap gadget which has impressed even infamous peanut farmers like Jimmy Carter. A Gift to the World, he calls it.
Mama, I promise to look this Brandis guy up for you and bring him to our village. My mama, in her 55 years, still finds time from her teaching job in the village school to employ farm hands to shell peanuts for her. And she reaps an impressive twenty 50 kg sacks a year. Not bad for her agrarian moonlighting, hmm…
Feted as a CNN Hero for his innovation, Brandis has worked with communities in 17 countries across four continents through his Full Belly Project to make hundreds of machines locally at minimal cost resulting in health benefits and increased family incomes.
