I am really not sure what crowdfunding is. Wikipedia puts it this way: “Crowdfunding (a form of crowdsourcing) is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, today often performed via Internet-mediated . . .”

I am not sure why a ‘large number of people’ would pay out anything to anybody else except to get something back. Perhaps this is, in fact, offered; I do not know. However, assuming that there is a crowd of people who read this column. Or a few. Or my staff. Well, some of the staff. One, perhaps. Just assuming. Here are some projects for which I would like to get crowdfunding. Your contributions would be most welcome. Further, if, in fact, there are any, your contributions would be well spent and fully accounted for.

Let us start with charcoal. It is a simple fact that, at many of the garden refuse disposal sites, there is a chipper. Branches, foliage and the like are fed into the chipper. The coarse sawdust that results is sold to nurseries and similar ventures that need garden mulch. I conducted this experiment: I saw a municipal official and a gang cutting down dead trees. So, I asked him, what can he do with the wood. Oh, he said, it goes to the chipper. So, I asked him, how many trees are cut down a month? Oh, he said, about 20, all dead.

And there are many trimmed trees. So, I thought, it would be quite a good idea to turn these trees into charcoal. Not too difficult. Chop the logs into sticks and then cook up the sticks in a drum in the absence of air. The sticks will give off gas and moisture and become charcoal. I looked on the Internet – there are plenty of videos about how to make charcoal and yet not one commercially available charcoal making machine which, if properly designed, could use the wood gas to heat itself up.

So, my first appeal is: let us have a sum of money to design a charcoal making machine that can be manufactured from 210 ∙ drums and that anybody with the ability to chop up wood could make some income.

Next, wood ash. Lightly used on a garden, wood ash is wonderful as a fertiliser (for herbs, it is spectacular). So, if you cannot be bothered to make charcoal, just make wood ash. What is needed is money for a wood burning stove that will produce easily retrievable amounts of wood ash.

Next, firelighters. It is so easy to make your own firelighters – you use egg boxes, wood chips and candle wax. Melt the wax, pour into an egg holder which has been filled with wood chips. You cannot get more recycling than that. But we do not do that – all of our firelighters are petroleum based. They do not have to be. What we need is crowdfunding for an investigation into how best to make firelighters that are fully recycled.

Next, paraffin lamps. The common paraffin lamp does not give off much more light than a candle. In fact, it gives off about as much heat as light. Lamps which produce greater light use gas-type mantles. These are brittle and not very long-lasting. We need crowdfunding to investigate how to burn paraffin more efficiently to produce more light.

Next, electricity from heat. In an earlier column, I wrote about a thermo bridge, which is a device that, if one side is kept cool and the other kept hot, will produce electricity (in reverse, this is the principle used for small camping fridges). It is a simple fact that much of Africa still has open fires at the homestead. We need crowdfunding to develop a device that you can push into the fire and get enough electricity to charge a cellphone or lithium battery.

All these ideas have merit. What we need is to develop further – most especially, what we do not need is for them to be developed by academics hoping to piggyback their MSc on the research and money with no real care about the result. There it is. Our operators are waiting for your call.