Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: charity

Unexpected Solar-Powered Borehole Update!

Posted on February 24, 2026

I did not expect to be typing this so soon, but pretty soon after we agreed to fund a solar-powered borehole for fresh clean water in Cameroon… I got an update on construction with pictures today! Very welcome as I expected this to take many more months. Here is what I received today:

“Anyway, the situation in Bagham was pretty desperate because it is currently the height of the dry season in that part of the West region and SHUMAS staff reported that there wasn’t a drop of water in the village. Fortunately, the drilling rig was available and was located quite close by so work could start straight away. I am attaching a photo of the drilling rig in place and others of the work which has been started on the construction of the tower for the tank. I am sure that this project will progress quickly”

How cool is that? Here are the pics:

Digging foundations for the water tower
Making the reinforced framework for the tower
Drilling Rig
Making framework for the tower

Its very uplifting for me to see progress on stuff like this! And if you buy any of my games, you are helping me fund stuff like this, which means you are awesome :D. Especially excited to see the eventual solar panels go in etc :D.

Positech is funding a solar-powered borehole in cameroon!

Posted on January 22, 2026

Long time readers of this blog will know that in the past we have funded two schools being built in Cameroon through the charity ‘Building schools for Africa‘. To cut a long story sort, I wanted to do something charitable, that was efficient and effective, and frankly you get a real good ROI when you do something like this, rather than donate to a charity in a relatively rich country like my own. £15-20k spent on a UK school gets you not much, but it builds a whole school in Cameroon, so to me the choice is obvious. FWIW I have no connection to Cameroon, I’ve never been there, but its a poor country that could really do with some help.

I did actually do one local school thing here, We paid for solar panels to be put on the roof of a local primary school. If you are wondering what this solar obsession is all about, I started a solar-farm company and built one in the UK. Its a loooong story :D. Oh and we donated a bunch of money to War Child in the past too, which is a super worthy charity for refugees.

But anyway, we are doing it again! After a long gap in charity giving while I got stressed about the spiraling cost of the solar farm, I can finally do stuff like this again. I had contacted Building Schools For Africa a while ago saying if they have any more solar-powered borehole projects, I would love to fund one, and they recently got in touch with just that. They send you a big government study on the problems, the impact a borehole would have, a cost spreadsheet and feasibility report etc. In this case, I was sent the one for the school (which was paid for by another donor) at the location where they need a borehole and it made very depressing reading. The borehole will be in bagam, shown here:

If you read that report, you would NEVER complain about your school again. Its unlikely your school has insufficient textbooks, or a dirt floor that floods in the rainy season. Its unlikely that the roof leaks so badly that the (shared) schoolbooks get destroyed. Its very unlikely the lack of a door means stray animals wander in and do animal things in the classroom. And its super unlikely that all the kids arrive late, and tired because they have been sent miles before school to fetch water.

Luckily, a proper engineered borehole solves a lot of problems. Its mostly one of time. We take fresh, clean, drinkable water for granted, but we should not, because its not universal. If you have a long walk to fetch water every day, thats a huge economic impact. Less time to attend school, less time to work, and it has serious economic implications. Being able to access clean reliable drinking water right next to a school will be a fantastic thing!

The cost is about £20k. Here is some detail from the charity:

The project provides for a solar-powered pump, to take water from the borehole to a large storage tank and pipework to take it on to 3 stand taps at central locations in the community, as well as training in the maintenance of all aspects of the facility.  This project is expected to totally transform the community and allow it to thrive: it is also seen as a peace-building initiative in a part of Cameroon that has been struggling for the past ten years due to additional pressures caused by the anglophone crisis.

And from the feasibility report:

Due to the topography the environment and that of the school. We came up with the various considerations

The overhead storage tank can be constructed at the school where the borehole will be drilled. The water storage tank will have to be constructed high enough to overcome the steep nature of the environment to be able to supply water up to the market.

The borehole can be drilled at the market where it is higher than the surface of the school. The storage tank will be constructed just few meters above ground. With this height difference, with the help of gravity, water can easily flow down slope to the market, the priority consumers which is the school, the palace and nearby residents.

TBH I think ‘palace’ might be a mis-translation, as looking at the location, I do not see anything I would call a ‘palace’. Anyway, I am excited about the project, because I love solar power, and remote communities in Africa is EXACTLY the best use case for distributed solar generation. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing updates on the project. And of course solar powered means super-convenient, and no work for people collecting water. Plus I think its awesome that for a lot of those kids, they will start to associate electricity with solar power by default, which makes sense.

Anyway, this is my ‘feel-good’ project for the year!

Solar school photos!

Posted on August 12, 2020

My company (positech games) gave £10,000 to a local primary school to spend on solar panels, because the kids were really into environmental issues and had protested in our local town about it…and I thought, yup, go for it kids! They were installed yesterday so I went and took photos today by drone:

There are 32 panels, in 2 strings of 16, roughly 10.2 kwp. My panels at home are only 2.1 kwp :(. Really glad I did this.

Positive by default

Posted on July 25, 2020

I read a few replies to some tweets recently…and ended reporting half of them for abuse. Not replies to me, but to pretty famous people. Apparently nobody with over a certain threshhold of twitter followers can say anything without hateful abuse, insults, death threats, and the like being pasted to them. Some people stalk a celebrity and reply to every tweet of theirs with the same post, hoping to get the orgasmic thrill of thinking that person will see something that upsets them.

These people are sick, and need treatment, but mostly they need banning from twitter. Twitter of course doesnt care, because the platform is deliberately built to encourage hate.

This is a choice, and a bad one (for society) because it could quite happily have been based on a theme of positivity and inspiration and community instead. There is an assumption that all online communities collapse immediately into a horrific hate-fest because of human nature, but I don’t think people have seriously tried to do the opposite.

It would be trivial to train an AI (or even simpler) to bias the promotion of social media posts based on some analysis of tone. At the very least, you can hide, ban or even just auto-downvote posts containing negative terms and swear words, or in all-caps. If anything, twitter does the opposite, but thats a choice.

We live now in a society so corrupted by social media, that it has spilled over into life in general, especially the media. I recently watched (at my wifes suggestion) the disney film ‘moana‘. Not my kinda film, but it was ok, and a few days later I satill have this catchy, chirpy ‘your welcome’ song in my head. Whats notable about that film for me, is that its upbeat. Its positive. There is a happy ending, and not a lot of suffering or depression or hatred in it. Its sad that this sticks out, but a simple browse of whats trending on netflix shows you how unusual this is.

Dwayne Johnson's Moana-Obsessed Daughter Is Still Unaware Of One ...

Sadly we take these attitudes into our daily lives. We carry around the moods and thoughts and opinions of social media and netflix into social interactions. When I chat to my buddies each day they often say ‘whats todays twitter drama’ and we know that means accusations, or hatred or abuse. Its never ‘whats hilarious and exciting and awesome on twitter today’. We are all looking for todays 15 minutes of hate, not thanks, or celebration.

Its difficult for someone like me to preach about how everyone should be positive because 1) I’ve done very well out of life financially and 2) I actually have depression, so it can seem kinda ironic :D. However I shall try!

I read a good book last year about how everything in the world is getting better and better for all of us, and how things are amazing. Its sounds like bullshit but its true. By almost any metric, society just keeps getting better. Less hunger, Less disease, Less poverty, More education. We live in a time of relentless progress and awesomeness. This never gets on the news, but thats a CHOICE. We can choose to focus on whats good and awesome in the world if we choose to.

Even if you are on a low income, or unemployed right now, things are really not too bad compared with almost any point in history. Even given my own life, I would DEFINITELY prefer to be poor and unemployed right now than in the very early 1990s when I was both those things. We didnt have the internet to entertain/amuse/inform or educate us. Unemployment in the UK was pretty bad then (way worse than now). I had to learn computing by trips to the library as I couldnt afford the books. I’d listen to music on a casette player as I walked to the library. No mp3s, no spotify. shitty, poor quality clunky casettes.

Audio Tapes Vs. HD Audio?

The thing is, we DO live in great times, if you can brush apart the waves of monetized negativity and try to be positive by default. We are actually making phenomenal strides in renewable energy. Computers have got so laughably fast we all have a personal supercomputer we can talk to and it talks back. wtf! We can even carry them in our pockets and communicate with our friends wherever they are.

Just pause and imagine covid lockdown in 1990. No internet. No mobile phones. You cant see your friends, you cant even talk to them unless your parents let you use *the phone* for a short (expensive) period. You have to amuse yourself with books, a very, very primitive games console if you are super-lucky, or watch whatever your parents choose to watch from the 3 or 4 channels of terrestrial TV. And no, its not HD.

TV Whirl - ITV Teletext

Things are awesome now. People are landing rockets on boats to re-use them so even rural people can have super-fast internet soon. You can buy solar panels and use them to partially power your own house. Take that energy companies! There are a bazillion channels of entertainment in superb picture quality, and endless fun entertainment on youtube for everyone. You can make and sell video games FROM YOUR HOME, and you can learn how to do it from home too, for free.

And yes… believe it or not, you likely live in a society that is WAY less sexist, WAY less racist and WAY more accepting of people of all kinds than twenty or thirty years ago. Its telling that its totally unacceptable for me to even mention the derogatory words used for people of color routinely when I was a child. Sure, sexist, racist and transphobic people exist, but oh my god, the progress on these issues has been amazing.

But lastly, the thing that REALLY annoys me is that saying ‘hey, life is pretty cool isn’t it’ is something you will get ABUSE for posting on twitter. Its literally described as a ‘bad take‘. This is fucked up. People are so obsessed with doomscrolling and ‘calling out’ and hurling abuse they are actually subconciously banishing positivity from their lifes. This is nuts.

So yeah, life is good. Not perfect, but then it never was and never will be, but life is good. Dont be afraid to think it, or say it, or even tweet it. Its not a ‘bad take’ if its what you think.

Heres a final feel-good thingy. I love solar panels, and I like doing the odd charity thing. We just handed over a check for £10k (yes an actual check!) to our local primary school (which has an eco-school group and have been protesting about climate change), so they could have 32 solar panels installed on the roof. They gave me this cool certificate :D. I’ll take some drone pics of the fitting of them in a month or two when they get installed :D.

Impact report on school #2

Posted on February 26, 2020

I just got a big info dump about the second school I paid for in Cameroon. Also lots more pics. For the first time I got proper pics of the old school (before we had pics of a different school, which eventually we changed from to this site):

which doesnt look too good and had numerous issues:

“Since 4 out of 7 seven available classes had dilapidated and were
abandoned, only the 3 available classes in a manageable state could be
effectively used. Classes 1 and 2 had to share a single classroom, classes 3 and 4 and classes 5 and 6 also shared a room respectively. The classrooms were therefore overcrowded making teaching and learning very difficult.
Whenever lectures of one class were more interesting, pupils from the other class sharing the room were distracted and could not concentrate on their lectures. This impacted negatively on the performance of the pupils.”

With the old school, the stats were as follows:

“The total number of pupils in the school when feasibility studies were carried out stood at 205, of whom 114 were girls and 91 were boys. At the time of the feasibility, the school had a total of 4 teachers including the head teacher who were all employed and paid by the church. Some of the teachers had to teach 2 classes as the teachers were not enough to cover the classrooms.”

The main problems:

  • Insufficient and inadequate classrooms
  • Insufficient benches, tables and chairs for pupils and teachers respectively
  • Inadequate toilet facilities in the school
  • Lack of water in school

The new school looks like this:

The project had the following outcomes:

  • 3 classrooms, an office and store have been constructed and handed over to the school
  • A 3 compartment toilet block with hand washing facility constructed and under use in the school presently
  • 27 Benches, 3 teachers tables and chairs provided and in use

More interestingly:

  • An improvement in pupils’ performance have already started to be noticed since they started using the new infrastructure and equipment in 2019/2020 academic year. The syllabuses can now be covered as no time would be lost to rainfall disturbances or cleaning of dusty floors
  • Enrolment have increased by over 92 pupils at the beginning of the 2019/2020 academic year with the presence of the new infrastructure and would continue to increase
  • A reduction in the prevalence of illness among the children and improved hygiene and sanitation in school. Upper track respiratory track infections have reduced as well as jiggers
  • School attendance have improved to over 100% since the use of new infrastructure especially for classes using them and this would continue.

I’m very pleased to have hard numbers on this stuff. More kids getting an education, and more kids getting a BETTER education, plus a reduction in health problems. Awesome. Total cost is about £24k.

Its worth noting that sometimes the shortage of teachers is related to the condition of the school. Basically a nice, modern, clean school will attract the best teachers, and more of them.

Regrettably, Cameroon is facing serious problems, and they badly need help. I currently have a bad back AND bad toothache (just got back from dentist), but its humbling to realize just how amazeballs lucky and healthy I am, mostly because I happened to be born in the UK. Anyway, thanks again to everyone who buys my games and puts me in a position to do this kind of thing.