In a modest school laboratory tucked away in rural Siaya County, a flicker of blue flame from a test tube changed the course of Richard Arua's life.
Then a chemistry teacher at Mudhiora Secondary School, Arua had spent years guiding students through science congress competitions, often taking them to national-level triumphs.
But in 2016, one experiment would catapult him out of the classroom and into Kenya's growing clean energy space.
Together with his students, Arua set out to tackle a problem plaguing the region: the invasive water hyacinth choking Lake Victoria, with a bold aim of extracting ethanol from the weed and seeing if it could burn. "As the water hyacinth continued to choke Lake Victoria, we asked ourselves if it could be harvested and converted into something useful.
