IN A NUTSHELL - FINALIST
MALAWI

In 2001 engineer Jock Brandis, founder of the Full Belly Project was visiting a friend in Mali in West Africa. On a visit to women's cooperative he noticed that they were still shelling peanuts -- the most important local cash crop -- by hand. A year later he was back with his specially-designed Universal Nut Sheller which helped the women process five times as many peanuts.

Brandis' invention was to be the start of an Africa wide project to promote easy-to-make and easy-to-maintain technologies to improve agricultural output sustainably.