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