Power-generating soccer ball could light up the developing world.

The Challenge: The use of kerosene to light people homes has serious health risks for 1.5 billion people worldwide. Kerosene not only is expensive, but the smoke poses serious health risks and its flames are very dangerous. The World Bank estimates that breathing the fumes created from burning kerosene indoors equals the harmful effects of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day.

More than 270 million people play soccer worldwide, including 46 million Africans, according to a 2006 FIFA study. In most African countries, 95 % of the population lives without access to electricity, according to a 2006 World Bank Millennium Goals Report.

The Solution: sOccket, is a plug-in soccer ball that captures the energy during game play to charge LEDs and batteries. The ball uses an inductive coil mechanism to generate energy.  After playing with the ball, the child can return home and use the ball to connect a LED lamp to read, study, or illuminate the home.

sOccket was an engineering class assignment at Harvard University, where co-founders Jessica Lin, Jessica Matthews, Julia Silverman, and Hemali Thakkar quickly bonded over their shared experiences in Africa and other developing countries to create an ingeniously simple portable generator.

When the game of soccer (football) has been concluded, the child can return home with a fully charged ball, and using the built-in fixture, connect a LED lamp to illuminate the home.

The movement of the ball forces a magnet through a coil that induces a voltage to generate electricity and the coil doesn’t affect the motion of the ball. The beauty of sOccket is that a kid in a developing nation can play a game of soccer after school, leave the playground, take the ball home, plug a basic lamp into a built-in fixture and have enough light to do homework.

For every 15 minutes played on the first version of sOccket, the ball was able to store enough energy to illuminate a small LED light for three hours. sOccket 2.0 has improved that ratio. Now, less than 10 minutes of play yields three hours of energy

The energy ball may be a source of inspiration for many social innovators that are seeking innovative ways to enhance the lives of people in need.