The sOccket was invented by Jessica Lin, Jessica Matthews, Julia Silverman and Hemali Thakkar, 4 Harvard students.
When played with, this ball captures all the energy made from being kicked, dribbled or thrown and stores it for later use. It is cheap and requires no grid. Which means it can provide entertainment and energy / electricity to villages that have no electrical grids/ infrastructure.
What started as a team project for an engineering science class has become a social innovation that could change the lives of African children and their families, by combining fun with genuine need.
Jess and friends were inspired by the knowledge that dance floors capture the energy of dancers that are moving on them.
How it works
Like those flashlights that you shake to power up, it is based on inductive coil technology. When you play football for 15 minutes, it will generate and store enough power to light an LED lamp for up to 3 hours, a full game, or playing with it for the full length of a game, could provide a family with enough light for over 1 night. Imagine this: 95 percent of the population in Africa, live with no access to electricity. Now imagine flying over all of Africa and seeing it lit up. Not by dangerous and costly kerosene lamps, (that are also causing breathing problems via their smoke), but the same electricity that pumps through our homes and that we take for granted every night, when we switch it on after work, till we go to bed.
That’s the potential of this one small invention. It can even charge a cellphone or battery, making communication a more viable option as well. So, in theory, sOccket can now allow for mobile tech into these villages and to connect these villages to what is our there in the rest of their country and the world.
The current prototype is just 5 ounces more than a regular football. To make it more affordable, in Africa and therefore minimal in cost, the girls are exploring constructing the ball from materials local to Africa and making it even lighter/closer to the original weight of an everyday, normal football. They also want to make it durable and last through dust, rain and intense heat.
The plan: sell it at a higher-cost in the US and Europe and use the profits from these sales to help begin fund the distribution of the balls at little to no cost in developing countries, like Africa.
sOccket has won a $1500 award from the Clinton Global Initiative University, to help buy more balls and internal parts.
Awista Ayub, another amazing example of good in the world (an Afghani author and founder of Afghani football teams for girls) is promoting the initiative in Afghanistan amongst her team and worldwide.
The latest: Julia is at the World Cup in South Africa pushing the sOccket to grassroots divisions and organisations in South Africa and at matches. She has tied up with Hoops for Hope – at a township in Cape Town and a Grassroots Football for Hope centre in Khayelitsha – another township. Meanwhile, Hemali is in Liberia and Jessica Matthews is in Nigeria.
They held a Mini Youth World Cup in Boston to get youth into the sOccket and were recently featured on CNN with their invention.
CNN Interview with the Girls
For anyone who is convinced through watching American dramas and sitcoms that American teens and university students are busy guzzling beers, having toga parties, sleeping around and cruising malls for sales and studs, these girls make us rethink our stereotypes.
What could have been a simple university project they got a grade for and then moved on from, has become an invention that they have set aside their lives, passions, energy and spare time for, on top of their university degrees.
Some of us have never experienced power outages, some of us who have, see it as an excuse for some old-fashioned evenings without electronics and a romantic dinner. But most of the world today lives that way everyday and it is far from anything out of a novel or a novelty, for that matter.
This group of Harvard women (go WOMEN!) show us that there is good in the world, and they have poured themselves into it. They have prioritised changing the lives of those in the developing world, over their own life-changing college years.
I can’t wait to see what happens. Follow them on their blog and on twitter:
The Good in The World 
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