It was a long drive from Mzuzu to Karonga today. The distance is around 140 miles but it was five hours driving each way because of some serious potholes. This, and the stunning beauty of the countryside, made me feel quite at home although the potholes here are a different scale from the Scottish ones to be fair. I stopped to take pictures of the view and came back to find a baboon sitting on the car bonnet so that bit is not so much like Scotland!

Great view of Lake Malawi with Tanzania on the far shore
The main road linking Malawi with Tanzania, and an important trade route.

In Karonga I was visiting the rice processing factory belonging to NASFAM (The National Association of Smallholder Farmers). Some readers of this blog may be familiar with the Rice Challenge run by Just Trading Scotland. High quality Kilombero rice is exported to Scotland and sold through Churches and schools. This is the factory it comes from. This was a final bit of research for our Innovate UK project looking to convert farm wastes to biogas and then use an innovative gas turbine to generate electricity, and the factory is a good prospect. Their waste is a problem and a hazard, and they need a lot of power to run the processing machines. Our hope is to get mid-stage funding from Innovate UK to allow us to run real-life trials in situations like this in Malawi and prove the technology works. We should be able to submit a funding application in June/July, although the recent UK Aid cuts make all such programmes a bit vulnerable.

In a country where power is scarce and unreliable, waste-to-power solutions like this seem an obvious innovation.

I’ve seen many things on the back of a bike in Malawi, but a dug-out canoe is something new. I wondered if it was being delivered to its new owner and whether it is 7 years late and three times the original budget! Something else just like Scotland.