#93 2000 · Barefoot College (Bunker Roy) · Rural development / renewable energywrong-door
Rural electrification programs kept training the wrong people — the ones qualified enough to leave — so Barefoot College trained grandmothers instead
the problem
The people most qualified to receive technical training in a poor rural area are also the people most likely to leave for a city once they're trained
background
Rural electrification and appropriate-technology programs across the developing world routinely trained young, literate local men as solar technicians, on the reasonable assumption that literacy and technical aptitude were the right selection criteria for a skilled technical role. That approach had a predictable failure mode: once a young man held a technical certification, he had a credential that traveled — and cities offered better pay than a remote, off-grid village could, so trained technicians left for urban jobs shortly after certification, leaving the village's solar systems unmaintained once something broke.
Bunker Roy founded Barefoot College (originally the Social Work and Research Centre) in Tilonia, Rajasthan in 1972, and over subsequent decades the organization concluded that the standard selection criteria for technical training were solving for the wrong variable: not who could learn the material fastest, but who had no realistic path to leave the village once trained.
the move
Barefoot College began deliberately recruiting rural grandmothers — typically women aged 35 to 50, often illiterate, with grown children and deep roots in their communities — and training them as solar engineers, on the reasoning that a credential is only useless to an employer elsewhere if the person holding it has no intention of leaving. Because participants often couldn't read a manual in any shared language, training relies entirely on color-coding, hand signals, pictorial diagrams and repetition rather than written instruction, letting women from dozens of different countries and languages train side by side.
the payoff
Since 2000, roughly 1,600 'Solar Mamas' have been trained from 96 countries, solar-electrifying about 60,000 houses and saving an estimated 45 million liters of kerosene that would otherwise have been burned for lighting, with the Barefoot approach reaching remote villages across 25 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
what came after
Barefoot College won the Ashden Award for renewable energy in 2003 and Bunker Roy received the Clinton Global Citizen Award in 2013, and the Solar Mamas model — training the person most rooted in a community rather than the person most conventionally credentialed — is now cited in rural-development and appropriate-technology literature as a reference case for solving technician-retention failures by changing the selection criteria rather than the training itself.
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references
- [1]Women Barefoot solar engineers a community solutionBarefoot College International, 2023barefootcollege.org
- [2]'Solar Mamas': Barefoot College women turn on the lights in off-grid villagesThe Christian Science Monitor, 2013csmonitor.com