Jock Brandis, Founder of The Full Belly Project was recognized in the Wall Street Journal for his work developing simple devices in improve life in developing countries. Read the full story online.

This is the excerpt from the November 14, 2009 article:

Inventor Makes Hard Work Easier

How hard can it be to shell a peanut? Jock Brandis found out on a trip to Africa that the task can be remarkably difficult—especially for poor farmers who shell pounds of nuts every day to feed their families.

Mr. Brandis, 63, is the director of research and development at Full Belly Project, a nonprofit he set up in 2003 to distribute his own invention, a simple nut-shelling machine that can be made by pouring concrete into a mold. The Universal Nut Sheller, as Mr. Brandis calls it, costs about $30 and turns the chore of nut-shelling into an easy job—liberating poor populations from a time-consuming and hand-crippling task.

"A friend of mine who was in Africa with the Peace Corps contacted me in 2000 to ask me to come fix a malfunctioning solar-powered drinking-water system," recalls Mr. Brandis, who is known as something of a mechanical whiz. "In a moment of complete irresponsibility, I charged a plane ticket and headed to Africa."

He fixed the drinking-water machine, but also noticed something else: Many of the women in the village spent their days shelling sun-dried peanuts to eat or sell for a small profit, and many of them had bleeding hands from the grueling work.

"I saw if they had a simple machine to shell nuts, it would completely alter their lives," says Mr. Brandis, who went home to North Carolina with a new goal in mind: find a nut-shelling machine. But after months of research—he even contacted former President Jimmy Carter—he realized no such machine existed. "I had to build it myself," he says.

Tinkering in his garage, Mr. Brandis came up with the idea of making a machine out of concrete, because it was cheap and universal. Since then, he has adapted the sheller to work with coffee beans, shea and jatropha, a seed that can be processed into biofuel, and has devised pedal-powered and electric-powered versions for processing larger crops.

The Full Belly Project doesn't know how many of the machines are in use, because it has distributed the molds in 17 developing countries and locals can make as many machines as they want. But the group expects there are "thousands and thousands," says Mr. Brandis.

Mr. Brandis wasn't officially retired when he started the Full Belly Project, but his working life had, by his own estimation, "reached bottom." After getting a degree in anthropology in 1968, he traveled the world—teaching high school in a slum in Kingston, Jamaica, and working with Oxfam, a charitable group, in Nigeria. He then returned to Canada, where he grew up after his Dutch parents emigrated there in the late 1940s, and began a career as a film lighting technician. But after he and his family moved to North Carolina so he could work at a film studio there, his wife fell ill and died of cancer. Though he started a small company supplying electrical generators to the movie industry, his work languished as he raised two children on his own.

The Full Belly Project has given Mr. Brandis a new lease on life, and the energy to work around the clock to get his nut-shelling machines and other new inventions—like a patented, pedal-powered water pump now being tested in four African countries, as well as stoves, threshers and toilets—into as many hands as possible. He sends the devices to non-governmental organizations, missionary groups and universities world-wide, but also sells them to for-profit companies. His organization's goal is to deliver end-to-end farming and irrigation systems to help villages become self-sustaining.

"I saw that you can change the world for next to no money," he says. "Now I want to do more—give communities entire solutions from planting, harvesting, shelling, storing and shipping their harvests. And I can see that it's entirely possible."