4 Humanitarian Inventions Designed by African College Students

Jun 4, 2010 Lisa Dodge

Students at four universities have developed inventions to provide humanitarian aid in rural Africa.

Humanitarian aid, especially to Africa, is a huge concern for many college and university students today. Here are a few innovative and helpful inventions designed by college students intended to improve the quality of life in poor, rural areas of Africa. Most of the inventions arose from a combination of students’ awareness of problems facing Africans and their ability to approach those problems with creative solutions.

The sOccket

Harvard engineering students Jessica Lin, Jessica Matthews, Julia Silverman and Hemali Thakkarfour recognized the problems caused in Africa by the lack of electricity: children can not do their schoolwork after dark, and families struggle to complete the day’s tasks while sunlight was still available. Many Africans use kerosene lamps for light, which bring with them the danger of fire and smoke inhalation.
The four students knew that soccer is a popular pastime for African youth and set out to develop a way to use the African passion for soccer to bring clean and accessible energy into African homes. They developed the sOccket, a soccer ball with a mechanism inside that uses the motion of a soccer player’s kicks to shake a magnet through a coil to generate electric power. After 15 minutes of play, a sOccket has collected enough energy to keep an LED light lit for three hours.


Read more at Suite101: 4 Humanitarian Inventions Designed by College Students http://www.suite101.com/content/4-humanitarian-inventions-by-college-students-a244764#ixzz12m5oq1NZ

Ingenious Inventions from Africa

by Gary Woodill on July 27, 2009

I’m always looking for new uses of mobile devices, which led me to discover the AfriGadget website. Its tagline is “AfriGadget: solving everyday problems with African ingenuity”. Recently there was a story of young Pascal Katana (above) of Kenya, who invented a device that electronically calls fish using their own feeding sounds, and then uses a mobile phone to alert the owner of the net via SMS that it is filled with fish. This electronic device that “automates” fishing, is described as follows:
“The trap employs amplification of the sound made by fish while feeding. The acoustic signals are radiated and attract other fish who head toward the direction of the source thinking there is food there.
Once a good catch is detected by a net weighing mechanism, it triggers a GPRS/GSM device attatched to the system and the fisherman gets a call/sms informing him that his catch is ready. Pascal is in the process of developing a by-catch control system which will ensure that his contraption doesn’t cause overfishing.”
Ingenious!
Read about other African inventions in this interesting website. (Via KatrinVerclas) (GW)

Fish ‘call’ the Fisherman |AfriGadget | Obie | 21 July 2009