LocationsFrom Floodwaters to Fresh Water: A Young Malawian Innovator Turns Crisis into Opportunity
July 31, 2026
Bula's solar-powered air condenser is a device designed to extract water from the air and provide clean, safe water for domestic use.
When Melchizedeck Bula first saw the aftermath of the flooding in southern Malawi, he saw not only destruction. He saw a question.
“What would someone in such a situation need?” he recalls asking himself.
For many, the answer may have been shelter, food, clothing or money. For Bula, a 23-year-old community innovator from Chichiri in Blantyre, the answer came down to something more basic and more urgent: safe drinking water.
That moment, during a programme visit around Thyolo District about two years ago, planted the seed for an innovation he is now developing at the University Innovation Pod, or UniPod, at the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences in Blantyre.
“I started thinking about safe drinking water,” he says. “And as I played around with that idea, I realised that the provision of safe drinking water also provides for food, because when you consider cooking practices in most Malawian homes, especially in rural areas, boiling is central.”
His idea has since grown into a solar-powered air condenser, a device designed to extract water from the air and provide clean, safe water for domestic use. It is aimed especially at rural households, disaster-affected communities and people living in areas where access to safe water remains unreliable.
Bula says the device is designed to produce up to 100 litres of water a day, enough to support the drinking and cooking needs of an average household.
“When you consider the average household in Malawi, with around five individuals, and the amount of water used by a single person daily for basic needs such as drinking and cooking, 100 litres is a lot of water for various domestic purposes,” he explains.
His innovation is still being refined, but its ambition is clear: to help communities reduce dependence on unsafe water sources, especially in moments of crisis.
For Bula, the journey began long before UniPod. He describes himself as someone who has always loved to tinker, to sit with an idea, test it, break it apart and rebuild it.
“I am the kind of individual who every now and then sits down and considers what I have learned so far, and I try to make something out of it,” he says.
His academic path has not been straightforward. He first enrolled to study tourism, but quickly felt out of place. He wanted to build things. He wanted to work with his hands and ideas. He eventually applied to change programmes, drawing on his background and experience in technical projects.
“I felt out of place,” he says. “It was strange not being able to do things that satisfied me, things that completed me.”
His earliest passion was aeronautics, the science of aircraft design and flight. At one point, he worked on a compressor concept inspired by jet engine systems, combining elements from different designs to explore a new technical approach. That project caught the attention of a government innovation office and opened further pathways for him in Malawi’s innovation ecosystem.
But it is water, not flight, that now anchors his current work.
The prototype of his solar-powered air condenser was built using materials and resources he could access on his own. It allowed him to test the basic principles of the water extraction mechanism. But progress was slow.
"Being here at UniPod, I am able to make things almost at the same pace at which I am conceptually working.”Melchizedeck Bula
The UniPod provided Bula with access to fabrication tools, prototyping equipment, mentorship and technical support
Then he found UniPod. Located at the Malawi University of Business and Applied Sciences (MUBAS), UniPod is part of UNDP’s pan-African timbuktoo initiative, which is investing in youth-led innovation, entrepreneurship and industrialisation across the continent. It provides access to fabrication tools, prototyping equipment, mentorship and technical support that many young innovators would otherwise struggle to find.
For Bula, that access has been transformative.
“The UniPod has been very instrumental,” he says. “The first prototype I made using my own resources. The second prototype was made here at UniPod, with access to better equipment, modelling tools and other useful resources.”
At UniPod, he has been able to refine the device, test critical components and gather data to inform the design of the final product. He has used the mechanical workshop and electronics lab extensively, drawing on both equipment and mentorship.
“The data from that prototype helped with refining the mechanism and also with designing the actual final product,” he says.
What makes UniPod especially important, Bula adds, is that it helps innovators move from imagination to production at a pace that was previously impossible for him.
“Previously, I would have a conceptual idea of something and because of the inability to actually materialise it, sometimes the idea would die,” he says. “Sometimes I would have to make compromises. But being here at UniPod, I am able to make things almost at the same pace at which I am conceptually working.”
That, for a young innovator in Malawi, can be the difference between an idea that disappears and a product that reaches communities.
Bula is not a university insider in the traditional sense. He comes from the community. He is not simply using UniPod as a student laboratory but as a space where raw curiosity, local experience and technical ambition can meet.
His message to other young innovators is direct.
“If you are not using UniPod, you are missing out,” he says. “We have resources here that you probably are not going to find anywhere else in Malawi.”
His work reflects a growing continental argument: that Africa’s next generation of innovators do not lack ideas. What they often lack is access to tools, patient mentorship, prototyping facilities, testing environments and pathways to commercialisation.
UniPod is designed to close that gap. For UNDP, through the timbuktoo initiative, the model is part of a broader effort to support young Africans to build solutions that respond to local challenges while carrying the potential for continental scale. In Malawi, the centre at MUBAS is serving as a flagship space for turning local ingenuity into market-ready products.
Bula’s solar-powered air condenser is still on its journey. It is not yet the finished answer to Malawi’s clean water challenges. But it is already a powerful example of what happens when young people are given the tools to think, build, test and improve.
Behind the prototype is a young man who saw flood-affected families and asked a simple but profound question: What do people need most when everything has been washed away?
His answer was water. And in a workshop in Blantyre, he is trying to draw it from the air.
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