African street mechanics and junk scavengers push the global north towards climate solutions
Freetown—Like a pop star eager to match the success of his last big hit, Emmanuel Alie Mansaray stalks the streets of this steaming, teeming African capital searching. He’s searching for inspiration: the spark that will allow him again to capture lightning in a bottle. In this case, almost literally. For it’s not lightning that made him an environmental superstar at age 25. It was sunlight.
In 2022, the Sierra Leone native made headlines globally—feted as an up-and-coming “frugal innovator” by the United Nations Development Programme—when he unveiled a creation that had consumed him for years. It wasn’t a hit song, a poem, or a painting, but a vehicle.
He dubbed it the Imagination Car, a solar-powered roadster rigged almost entirely from parts scrounged in Freetown from junkyards and repair shops.
Now he’s focused on an even bigger dream: perfecting a technique to retrofit thousands of motorized Freetown taxis—and millions more worldwide—to operate on renewable energy sources. Success would allow millions of Global South vendors to conduct their livelihoods more frugally while also rescuing millions from the health risks of fossil fuel contaminants.
Amid honking horns and carbon monoxide fumes—and temperatures that rarely drop below 100 degrees Fahrenheit—Mr. Mansaray is a bundle of action. Searching trash piles for parts—and the Internet for partners—he’s a local innovator who acts globally, determined to plug his generation’s brainpower into a network of Global South achievers.
Wearing sandals, pre-ripped blue jeans, and a chartreuse T-shirt bearing the slogan “Be the person your dog thinks you are,” he finds opportunity in all kinds of cast-off items.
Text alerts from fellow nerds bring him discarded treasures like the paraplegic wheelchair a mate found abandoned near Sierra Leone’s airport. Mr. Mansaray paid $20 to haul the rusty hulk to his workshop opposite a busy highway toll booth.
“Teamwork makes dreams work,” he quips as he makes his rounds of mechanics’ shops and junkyards.
Emmanuel Mansaray’s career began a decade ago, when the Ebola pandemic gripped Sierra Leone and spread panic across his Freetown neighborhood. Tinkering with an old radio, he inverted its speaker, transforming it into a crude microphone to broadcast medical alerts to nearby residents.
He next turned to producing artificial limbs for Sierra Leonean amputees, many victims of the country’s bitter civil war. With imported prostheses costing between $1000 and $2000, Mr. Mansaray made his items available for about $100. The son of a welder father and a mother who operates a cookware stall in a public market, Mr. Mansaray was largely self-taught as an inventor of mechanical devices.
Observing his father’s work with metals, the young man learned to fashion internal support and joints for his prosthetic limbs from stainless steel, covering them with synthetic foam to replicate human flesh. Leather tanned to match a patient’s skin tone covered the crude prosthesis. Orthopedists performed the actual fittings. They gave Mr. Mansaray access to their clinics and tech labs as he perfected his technique.
Mr. Mansaray’s replacement limbs made him a finalist at a 2022 competition for African and Middle Eastern innovators. He came in second, behind an African who designed a “smart” walking cane for the blind. He turned next to solar panels, fashioning a simple lamp students could charge outside by day, then use at night to do their homework.
That led to the Imagination Car, which Mr. Mansaray says took an outlay of around $2000 he raised from a GoFundMe account. Wheels, headlights, and a drive shaft he took from junked cars. A two-speed gear shift was repurposed from the regulator mechanism he took from a ceiling fan. Linoleum mats line the interior. A lattice of bamboo strips formed the driver’s chamber, painted in the blue, white, and green of Sierra Leone’s flag.
“The windshield, the solar panels, I had to order. The rest I found,” he explains, pulling away the tarp to show a visitor the vehicle that made him famous.
Mr. Mansaray managed to make his Imagination Car fully operational without a combustion engine. Requiring neither fossil fuels nor even an electric charging station, it’s powered by solar panels mounted across its top. “Solar energy goes to the battery, which powers the wheels,” the inventor explains. The principle is simple: the Imagination Car captures power from Sierra Leone’s unlimited supply of sunlight, channeling it into a mechanism he devised from scavenging parts.
On its initial test drive, the Imagination Car reached a top speed of 9 kilometers per hour—not an insignificant pace in a country where traffic may be snarled for hours at a standstill.
More importantly, video of the Imagination Car went viral, transporting the young inventor to New York with four other Global South technologists. Car maker Hyundai emailed congratulations to Mr. Mansaray; the UNDP featured the Imagination Car in its publicity campaigns.
At the Lincoln Center premier of “For Tomorrow, The Documentary,” Mr. Mansaray represented Africa alongside fellow “frugalists” from Azerbaijan, Vietnam, India, and Peru, demonstrating cheap solutions to global scourges like hunger and climate change.
“This is the power of grassroots innovation,” the film’s narrator, actor Daisy Ridley, intoned over images of Mr. Mansaray’s Imagination Car zipping by. The film also aired on Amazon Prime and was screened at Barcelona’s 2022 Fixing the Future festival. Sadly, thieves made off with the Imagination Car’s battery during Mr. Mansaray’s travels abroad, so a visitor is reduced to imagining what the Imagination Car can do on the open road.
His future plans are even more ambitious, starting with the 3-wheel chassis he salvaged near the airport. Again, Mr. Mansaray intends to activate its motor by mounting a sheet of solar panels across the top of the vehicle. That will power a diesel engine he expects to buy second-hand from online vendors in China or India.
The young inventor is intentionally vague about the science involved. “People steal ideas,” he whispers, offering no further details of his solar-to-diesel technique. He allows only that it will be similar to those used in subway trains, which engineers call “magnetic brush rotation.”
He’s more open with his plans for deployment. Three-wheeled motor taxis from India are called kekehs in Sierra Leone. Thousands of men (and some women) operate kekehs for a living, rarely charging as much as $1 per fare. Across the entire country, some 100,000 kekehs ply streets and highways, with the majority here in the capital.
Mr. Mansaray calculates that the average kekeh driver spends $10 per day powering his or her vehicle with gasoline. Solarizing their vehicles would not only eliminate drivers’ $300 in monthly expenses. It would also relieve Freetown of much of its suffocating toxic haze.
But “solarizing” a gas-driven vehicle is also expensive. “Converting one kekeh to solar power would cost $2000,” says the inventor, adding such a cost could be financed through monthly payments—just as drivers now finance their kekeh purchases from dealers.
A new kekeh costs $3000 in Freetown. Adding $2000 retrofit to solar would nearly double that. Mr. Mansaray concedes it would be cheaper for manufacturers to build solar-driven models in the first place. But for that to happen, a prototype model needs to hit the streets and demonstrate that solar kekehs can be produced to scale and be profitable.
To that end, the UNEP’s Global Electric Mobility Programme supports over 60 countries in the Global South with US$130 million in grants to transition away from fossil fuels in the transportation sector, partnering with the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank.
Alfredo Maúl, another “frugal innovator” based in Central America, is hopeful that African innovators like Mr. Mansaray will receive more support in pursuing their goals.
Messrs Mansaray and Maúl have met just once, in 2021, on a Zoom call arranged by the UNEP. The Guatemalan says he admires his African counterpart, agreeing that both his cost calculations and approach to magnetic brush technology are sound.
“He’s what we call a chapucero, a mechanic who can fix anything,” the older man says. “What he has is what we all need: that creative way to convert garbage into action.”
He further admires Mr. Mansaray even more for surviving in Africa, whose conditions he describes as “like Guatemala a century ago.”
Like Mr. Mansaray, Maúl has launched a similar scheme to solarize Guatemala’s three-wheeled vehicles, unveiling his latest prototype in 2024.
Making use of improvements in lithium batteries that extend the storage life of solar energy, the 49-year-old Guatemalan boasts, “We put our prototype up against gas-powered vehicles and beat them,” explaining the gas-driven models managed just 60 kilometers per gallon. As compared with his solar version, which, he says, “can run all day on sunshine and then into the night.”
For the younger Mr. Mansaray, matching someone like Mr. Maúl sometimes feels like an impossible dream.
In October 2022, after receiving congratulations from Hyundai, he applied online for a Hyundai internship. He says he received no reply.
At that same time, Hyundai was enabling the UNDP to fund an “accelerator lab” in Guatemala City, where Mr. Maúl’s team was building his prototype.
That commitment means Mr. Mansaray can imagine one day receiving similar assistance. It also means he may face ever stronger competition when seeking funding.
In fact, Mr. Mansaray already has a local rival, James Samba, who turned 27 earlier this year. Mr. Samba is the son of a school-teacher mother and father who worked for Sierra Leone’s agriculture ministry. While he lacks Mr. Mansaray’s hands-on skill in making things, he has proved successful in building out prototypes of larger vehicles, including a ten-passenger minibus and a chassis that can accommodate wheelchair users.
Samba operates Sierra Electric Technol ogies, which in 2023 won the Orange Social Venture National Grand Prize, sponsored by the telecom giant for its work in electric vehicles. Since then, Mr. Samba has secured $20,000 in UNDP funding to help Sierra Electric produce five prototype vehicles capable of using both solar and electrically charged batteries to replace gas-driven vehicles. He’s also seeking funding from the UN to electrify agricultural machinery.
Samba and Mansaray have discussed joining forces, and perhaps soon will. There is a difference, however, in launching a fleet of vehicles powered by recharging stations and inducing others to produce kekehs that rely on sunshine alone. Mr. Samba’s models can do both, he says, although he concedes Sierra Leone at present lacks electric charging stations the public can access. Two stations, Freetown’s first, remain in the planning stage.
Mr. Mansaray, now 28, completed work on a university degree, becoming the first in his family to do so. But he still struggles to advance as an inventor.
Living at home. Mr. Mansaray survives by running a photography service that specializes in weddings, graduations, and birthdays. He estimates he makes $50 per month. Some days, he volunteers at a public primary school, teaching children rudimentary science classes.
Two summers ago, Philadelphia’s Drexel University rejected the Sierra Leonean’s application to seek a master’s in environmental engineering.
Drexel waived its $65 application fee, for which Mr. Mansaray was grateful. “It’s more than I earn in a month,” the young inventor says.
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