The Portable Light Project delivers light bright enough to read and work to rural areas without access to electricity, using solar panels, LEDs, and rechargeable batteries, all woven into a textile base by women weavers in the San Andreas region of the Sierra Madre, Mexico.

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Operation Blessing, a non-profit committed to “breaking the cycle of suffering” has taken the age-old technique of harnessing the sun’s heat to cook food, and turned it into a viable design for off-the-grid, minimal-resource third-world demographics. In the Gansu Province of China, and soon in Darfur camps, the sun-powered parabolic solar oven allows the suffering and hungry to cleanly cook and boil water and without firewood, using only that always-renewable energy source: the sun. The oven’s design is also a great example of using ancient technologies in modern ways to address social problems.

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