On every Soular Backpack, there’s a quote from Lupita that reads, ‘The Power Is In Your Step”.
Nyong’o and Disney went with the Soular team to Katwe in Uganda to distribute backpacks there in July. Soular was also showcased at the premiere of the movie in Hollywood later in September 2016.
Read more about the Soular Backpack on Forbes
In rural Kenya, electricity is a luxury that often acts as a barrier to basic needs like education. Salima Visram, (Kenya, UWC Atlantic College, 2009 – 2011), a former Aga Khan Academy, Mombasa student, understood this to be a problem early on, growing up in Kikambala and witnessing children forgo their education because they lacked access to electricity, thereby perpetuating a vicious cycle of poverty. Her solution to knocking down this barrier comes in the form of the Soular Backpack. True to its name, the backpack makes use of solar panels to charge an LED light that students can use at night to study and do homework without having to use an expensive and carcinogenic kerosene lamp. For every hour spent in the sun, students get 5 hours of light from the lamp. Visram created the first 2,500 backpacks after successfully raising $50,000 through crowd-funding and has already been distributing them in Kenya. She has been distributing the bags in parts of Kenya including the Kibera slums, Kakamega, Kisumu and Kikambala Village.
Visram partnered with Academy Award Actress Lupita Nyong’o after Nyong’o heard about the backpacks in 2015, shortly after finishing filming Disney’s Queen of Katwe, which is set in rural Uganda, where the kerosene lamp is central to the plot of the story. “I played Harriet, the mother to Phiona Mutesi, who finds herself in abject poverty and struggling to keep her family together and provide for them. Phiona wants to study chess. And in one of the scenes, she lights the kerosene lamp to do some studying at night, and her mother reminds her that it’s expensive and that she couldn’t afford it, so she has to switch it off,” Nyong’o told ABC News.
“I think this project has the power to change the world and I would like to see it move worldwide… To see children take charge of their education and be able to support themselves in this very, very simple and practical way, I think is extremely powerful. Because when you give a child that kind of illumination, they can excel better in school because they have the power to educate themselves,” she added.
