Can you imagine a college without walls, professors or classrooms? Educator Sanjit “Bunker” Roy can. More than 40 years ago, Roy, now 69, founded the Barefoot College in Tilonia, India. His school recruits a unique population – rural women, often grandmothers – and teaches them the basics of solar engineering and fresh water technology.
His efforts have yielded enormous benefits. When the women return home, they are skilled enough to provide their communities (some of the world’s most isolated places) with electricity and clean water. They also gain something important, if less tangible: newfound self-confidence.
The Barefoot model has already been used to empower women throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. Last September, former US President Bill Clinton presented Roy with a Clinton Global Citizen Award, which honours leaders who are addressing the world’s challenges in visionary and effective ways. The following is adapted from a speech that Roy delivered:
If you go all over the world to very remote villages, you will often find only very old people and very young people. The men have already left. So there are two ideas we’ve put into practice in order to make the Barefoot model work. First we declared that men were untrainable. Men are restless, men are compulsively mobile, men are ambitious, and they all want a certificate to show for their efforts. And the moment you give one of them a certificate, he leaves the village looking for a job in the city. So that is why we came up with the simple, commonsensical solution of training grandmothers.
Grandmothers are compassionate, tolerant, willing to learn and patient. All the qualities that you need are there. The second idea we’d practise was not to give out certificates. Because the moment you give a woman a certificate, she’ll see it as a passport for leaving rural areas and going to urban areas to find a job.
Barefoot College follows the lifestyle of Mahatma Gandhi: students eat, sleep and work on the floor. They can stay for 20 years, or they can go home tomorrow. As of today, we’ve trained 604 women solar engineers. These engineers have solar-electrified 45,000 houses in 1083 villages in 63 countries.
Please remember that our students are primarily women who have never left their villages before. They hate the idea of leaving their families and getting on a plane. When they reach India, sometimes after 19 hours of travel, they are faced with strange food, strange people, strange language. We do all the training in sign language. Yet in six months, they will know more about solar engineering than most university graduates.
Some women face problems at home for attending Barefoot College. In most of these traditional societies, the husband says, “If you go for training … I will take another wife.” Then the wife goes, and when she returns, she helps provide her village with solar electricity. And her husband says, “Please come back to me.” But she says, “No, I’m fine.” Because the respect she now has is enormous.
We taught a woman who came from Afghanistan. It was the first time a grandmother had left this village. Afterwards, at a community gathering, she went to sit with the men, who said, “What do you think you’re doing? You should be sitting with the women.” And she said quietly, “Today I am not a woman; I am an engineer. I have every right to sit with you.”
I have a dream. I would like to provide the world’s 47 least-developed countries with Barefoot College–trained grandmothers, and together they could solar-electrify more than 100,000 houses. I would like to reach a million people, and I hope you will be a part of this dream.
I will end with a quotation from Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.”
Source is Reader's Digest
