Definitely worth the six minutes to watch William Kamkwamba’s TED talk. This July 2009 video is worth a million words.

You can also see his original 2007 TED talk about his first windmill from their archive here.

TED also has an expanded bio and other links here.

From those links (definitely watch the short documentary):

A short documentary about Kamkwamba, called Moving Windmills, won several awards last year; Kamkwamba and friends are now working on a full-length film. You can read the ongoing details on his blog (which he keeps with help from his mentor), and support his work and other young inventors at MovingWindmills.org.