Inside the building, T4T's lab is indistinguishable from a storage room, save for a few rudimentary instruments used for quality testing MakaPads. Mounted on the walls and suspended from the ceiling of Musaazi's office are several iterations of a light he has engineered to run off a car battery. He uses them for backup during electrical failures, of which we experience two in the time we sit talking. "Their power consumption is very low, and the battery can run for three weeks," says Musaazi, who has sold about 150 of the lights, with which he continues to tinker.
On this day, as he enters the building, Musaazi is accosted by a small boy with a stained blue shirt and gappy grin. Steven, 6, is the son of a campus security guard; Musaazi pays his school fees. Musaazi bends down to catch the boy's request: He needs money for four schoolbooks, at 120 shillings (around 5 cents) each. "I tested him: What is the total cost of the books?" says Musaazi, as he extracts a handful of coins from a plastic bottle concealed in a battered filing cabinet and hands them to the boy. "He answered correctly, so I am giving it to him."
Musaazi supports Steven and 11 other children and young adults from poor families as a broad gesture of appreciation for the government scholarships that put him through Uganda's top primary and secondary schools. Always "clever" (he prefers that designation to "brilliant," the common accolade among those familiar with his work), Musaazi grew up in circumstances that did not portend success. His father, a bus driver, died when Musaazi was a month old, his mother nine years later. For the next few years, he lived with an aunt, who "for every single mistake made by a child would pull out the cane."
The aunt stamped out any entrepreneurial embers before they could ignite. Musaazi's best friend sold pancakes, which earned him enough to buy shoes—an unheard-of luxury in their village. "My aunt was afraid I was going to be tempted by money and drop out of school," says Musaazi. "You get money; you get shoes; you leave school and sell more pancakes."
In 1979, Musaazi—who has a doctorate from the University of London—landed at Makerere. But university jobs in Uganda are not well paid, and he anguished over affording top-notch educations for his own four children. To supplement his income, he tutored students in math and opened a small business making roof tiles.
Then, in 1985, Musaazi returned to his village to visit the graves of his parents and two of his brothers. There, he found the lush hardwood forests virtually wiped out, burned in the ubiquitous rough-hewed kilns that fire clay bricks for Uganda's construction trade. In that Lorax moment, the first of Musaazi's inventions was born.
Mohamed Walusimbi remembers burning trees. "I started doing this work in 1954, and now I think, My God, how many have I destroyed?" he says through an interpreter. Now 78, Walusimbi still works as a mason, and today he is constructing a wall on the grounds of Masooli Primary School, on the outskirts of Kampala. Forehead glistening beneath a red skullcap, he demonstrates how each brick nestles into the ones below and beside it. "This is a much better way to go," says Walusimbi.
In a clearing surrounded by low-slung school buildings, two reed-thin men in baseball hats and mud-stippled shirts work the press, one filling a mold with a thick porridge of soil mixed with smidgens of cement and water, the other raising a heavy metal lever and swinging it down hard to chunk out a brick. In 1993, Musaazi bought a version of the machine from a company in Nairobi for $200 and spent another $100 modifying it to produce the groove-and-tongue-shaped blocks. Unlike traditional clay bricks, Musaazi's do not require firing but dry when left stacked in the sun for four hours. Because of their shape, they require just a thin icing of mortar.
"Whenever someone gives money to a school for construction, the schools are asked to contribute in making bricks, so they cut down trees to fire them," says Musaazi as he briefly commandeers the lever. "In the end, you have a building but no trees."
The bricks, like Musaazi's other inventions, are examples of "appropriate technology," an idea introduced by the economist E.F. Schumacher in his 1973 classic Small Is Beautiful. Schumacher championed sustainable, low-cost, high-human-labor production methods that blend science with local knowledge. Musaazi says his bricks—in addition to their environmental benefits—cost 40 percent less to use than do fired bricks because workers make them on-site, so there are no transportation costs, no time lost between production and use, and no bricks broken during shipping. The savings also include materials costs: The bricks require little cement to produce and much less mortar than do their traditional counterparts.
Musaazi also designed a curved version of the bricks to build water tanks, which unlike the metal and plastic versions sold throughout Uganda do not rust and cannot be punctured by thieves. He sells the brickmaking machines for $1,500 to companies, individuals, and NGOs or provides construction services using the press. Whenever possible, he markets brick construction and a tank together, sinks the tank underground, and uses the excavated dirt to make bricks. Musaazi estimates he has constructed 850 buildings, including private homes and the pristine new health center here at Masooli.
