SOUlAR backpack
Salima and Samara both grew up in Mombasa, Kenya, beside a village of 20,000 people who live below the poverty line. They would notice children their age walking miles and miles to school each way, and also notice how the village was reliant on the kerosene lamp as their main source of light - a carcinogenic fuel that 1.2 billion people rely on every day. At the same time, a lot of these children would not have the grades to make it into secondary school - and a big reason for that was that they didn't have access to light and wouldn't be able to study efficiently after the sun went down. In 2015, two years before SAMARA was founded, Salima was in her last year of university in Canada and wanted to find a solution to this problem. After months of iterating and ideating, she started with a solar powered pen, and then a hat, a pair of shoes, a mobile library, and finally, The Soular Backpack came to life.
clean, safe light
The Soular Backpack is a backpack with a solar panel on it that now enables children in parts of East Africa to comfortably carry their books to school, but that also charges a lamp within the backpack as they walk. When they come home in the evening, their lamp is fully charged, so that they're able to do their homework with clean, safe light.
In 2016, Disney collaborated with The Soular Backpack to distribute backpacks in East Africa as they filmed The Queen of Katwe (a movie we highly recommend you watch!) To date, close to 12,000 Soular Backpacks have been distributed in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Botswana. Every SAMARA purchase since day one has contributed towards providing children with solar backpacks - and SAMARA was born in 2017 as a way to keep Soular going. The Soular Backpacks are produced in Kenya, as a way to provide jobs to people in the area.
the future
Salima and Samara hope to keep creating impact in the town they were born and raised, with Samara now building a secondary school where they grew up so that the children growing up there have access to a secondary school in the area, and can continue their studies.