Smartphones have increasingly become an indispensable tool for refugees and migrants staying in Greece. The utility and capabilities that they provide such as communication and navigation are invaluable to these groups of people. But finding electricity to power them may be hard especially in migrant camps filled with people competing for any available socket.
A team of students from Edinbrugh University found a way to address this problem. One of the student founders, Alexandros Angeloupolos, witnessed how important smartphones were to these migrants during his visit in the Greek island of Samos last summer. Many of them asked him to borrow his phone to call their family because their phone either died or are forced to share one plug. Angeloupolos wanted to helped them and found an efficient way to do so.
The solution? Solar-Powered phone charging booths.
Dubbed as Project Elpis, which means “hope” in Greek, the said solar-powered charging stations can support 12 plugs an hour and serve as many as 240 people a day with nothing but the sun powering it. The money for the project was crowdfunded through donations from the internet. “We just wanted to make a positive contribution to local communities through renewable energy,” said Samuel Kellerhals, one of the co-founders.
The student founders plans to install more booths and reach out to as many of the dozen camps around Greece as possible.
