In India recently, I visited a visionary – indeed revolutionary — institution called the Barefoot College, which embraces a very refreshing development ethos. Shunning the paternalistic, hand-out mentality so typical amongst organizations that work with the rural poor, this place seeks instead to empower rural people to uplift themselves by acquiring the technical skills to serve their own development needs.
Set in a small village called Tilonia, in the parched semi-desert of Rajasthan, one of India’s poorest states, the college is a place of informal, unstructured learning, where village women in colorful saris with toddlers in tow sit concentrating on configuring solar-powered electrity circuit boards and soldering radio parts.
It may call itself a college, but this is no ordinary place of learning.
I wanted to go there because I’d heard that the reach of their work extends not only to the parched, isolated villages of India, Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan — but also to communities in some 21 different African countries.
I was escorted around the college by Laxman Singh, who has worked at the college for the past 20 years and is himself of low-caste origin. He explained the college’s focus on empowering women by offering them exposure to technologies that aid development and raise living standards in ways that also protect the fragile environments where so many live.
The college itself is a showcase for some of these innovations: solar panels are ubiquitous, as well as parabolic mirror-reflector cookers. Various tanks and channels around the grounds, and conduits on the buildings, form an elaborate system of rainwater collection and storage — inspired by traditional practices.
The women who learn such techniques here, Mr. Singh said, will bring their education and skills back home to their villages and put them to work for the betterment of the community. “Women can change everything,” he says.
That is the idea behind the Barefoot Solar Engineers initiative: women selected by their communities travel to the college in order to learn how to solar-electrify their villages. They spend six months at the college learning the intricacies of configuring circuit boards and hooking up solar panels, before they return home equipped with enough materials and spare parts to be in business for the next 5 to 10 years.
Solar engineers in training
Households pay fees equivalent to what they’d otherwise have to spend on kerosene and candles — thus ensuring sustainability of the program and a livelihood for the barefoot engineer.
Helen Nchenge, 43, from Cameroon was one of 21 women from seven different African countries studying at the college when I visited.
She said that the access to solar lanterns would help children in her village do their school work at night without having to use smelly, dangerous and costly kerosene.
“This is going to change peoples’ lives, because the village has been living in darkness,” she said.
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