Solar Grannies

PRISM July/August 2011

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Solar grandmothers illuminate the developing world

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or the last 40 years, the long-term mission of the Barefoot College, located in the small village of Tilonia in Rajasthan, India, has been to work with the marginalized, the exploited, and the impoverished. Our goal is to help them lift themselves, with dignity and self-respect, over the poverty line. It is the first and only rural college in India built by the poor and exclusively for the poor.

The “barefoot” approach reflects Mahatma Gandhi’s central beliefs that the knowledge, skills, and wisdom found in the villages should be used for their own development; that technology should be demystified and decentralized into the hands of the rural poor; and that marginalized women should be given equal opportunities to learn. The idea is to apply the knowledge and skills that the rural poor already possess for their own development.

Living conditions at the college are simple so that the poor feel comfortable. Everyone sits, eats, and works on the floor.

Everyone earns a living wage rather than a market wage. The spiritual atmosphere at the college reflects a working relationship that is totally dependent on mutual trust, religious harmony, patience, compassion, equality, and generosity.

The college believes that the very poor have every right to access, control, manage, and own the most sophisticated of technologies to improve their own lives. Just because they cannot read and write is no reason why very poor and illiterate men and women cannot be water and solar engineers, designers, communicators, healthcare providers, architects, and rural social entrepreneurs. To date, several thousand trainees have accomplished extraordinary things, confirming the wisdom of Mark Twain’s proverb that we should never let school interfere with education.

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Solar

Grannies The world’s poorest women spark change as “barefoot” solar engineers

by Bunker Roy The target constituency has been rural poor families living on less than US$1/day. In families like these, the women spend much time and money fetching kerosene, wood, candles, and, These women when they can afford them, from several African nations flashlight batteries for lighting, learn about solar which is their highest expendicookers at the ture after food. They often have Barefoot College in India. to travel vast distances on foot to buy heavy 10-liter containers of kerosene. They walk miles to gather firewood from the already vanishing forests across Africa.

A rural family in Africa burns around 60 liters of kerosene a year to light their home, and the average kerosene lamp in Africa spews out more than a ton of carbon dioxide every decade. Most families also cook indoors over wood fires. The health effects of burning kerosene, coal, and wood are devastating: Toxic smoke causes respiratory diseases that kill 1.6 million women and children per year and causes severe respiratory problems for tens of millions.

Solar power is not only clean, it is also sustainable, and there are tens of thousands of villages across the African continent that can benefit from being solar electrified. The Barefoot College is taking it one village at a time.

Our Village Energy and Environment Committee will first visit a village to help the people understand that, while the hardware (such as photovoltaic panels and deep cycle batteries) will be funded by various international organizations, they

themselves must commit to regular payments that will cover replacement components and payment of the monthly salary of the barefoot engineer, which incentivizes her to maintain and repair the units. Each household agrees to pay a fee (generally $5-10 a month) for the solar lighting, roughly what they now spend on kerosene, candles, and flashlight batteries.

To date, close to 180 rural grandmothers have solar electrified 11,000 remote rural houses in 31 African countries. As a result of their collective efforts, they have managed to save 1.3 million liters of kerosene per month, a saving of enormous proportions for a population that is hardest hit by fuel and energy crises.

What’s more, these women are reducing the drudgery of women all over Africa, and they are doing it while setting an extraordinary example for females across the continent.

When these women, for the most part grandmothers who are considered useless in rural African society, return to their villages as empowered, bonafide solar engineers, they quickly become role models who go on to train other women in their villages and surrounding areas.

The least of these lead the way

It is now a policy of the Barefoot College to train exclusively illiterate or semiliterate middle-aged mothers and grandmothers from villages all over the world. The concentration since 2004 has been on training women from Africa.

For our purposes, we have found men to be virtually “untrainable.” Overall, they are restless, impatient, ambitious, and compulsively mobile. They all want certificates after training, but as soon as they get one they very quickly leave

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Partners and funding sources Organizations that have supported the barefoot approach in Africa include family foundations, banks, and international donor agencies, including the following:

❂ Stichting Het Groene Woudt (a private Dutch family foundation) provided funds to solar electrify villages in six African countries ❂ Skoll Foundation USA provided funds to solar electrify 30 communities in five “least developed countries” around the world ❂ Fondation Ensemble (a private French family foundation) funds solar electrification for villages in Mali and Malawi ❂ Norwegian Church Aid funds solar electrification of villages in Rwanda, Mauritania, Mali ❂ The GEF Small Grants Programme, hosted by the UNDP, has supported the hardware costs in Benin, Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Rwanda, Cameroon, Niger, Chad ❂ The Government of India, under the ITEC Programme, has provided free visas, airfare, and sixmonth training costs to train nearly 180 grandmothers from all over Africa.

In all these African countries, indigenous grassroots organizations have helped to identify villages, mobilize and sensitize the communities to make major decisions, identify the women trainees, prepare their passports and medical certificates, and get the governments of the host country to agree to send them to India. For their enormous efforts and financial output we are truly grateful.

ting and with each other, and begin to enjoy both the work and the camaraderie.

One remarkable outcome we’ve noticed from the women living together for six months is the tolerance they show to each other’s cultures and religion and how easily they exhibit mutual respect, living and working together, celebrating Muslim and Christian festivals together, exchanging gifts and showing curiosity to learn more about each other. This type of openness would never be possible—indeed it is almost un-

their village to take any job they can find in the city. The issuing of certificates by training institutions is one of the major reasons for migration from the villages to the cities.

In contrast, middle-aged rural women are on the whole solid, grounded in the villages, patient, persevering, tolerant, and not in the least bit interested in hanging certificates on their walls. They have no interest in leaving their villages, and even if they did their illiteracy means that no government or private agency will ever lure them away. Therefore these women represent the best long-term investment for the training provided by the Barefoot College, one that will be passed on to others in the village and passed down to future generations.

Since 2004, we’ve welcomed these poor, illiterate/semiliterate women, selected by their remote villages, to study at the 80,000-squarefoot college complex, which is itself exclusively powered by solar panels. We train 36 women at a time over a six-month period. For women who have rarely left their village, it requires undeniable courage and patience to leave their homes and families. The first month is a period of A rural Indian woman learning to weld and fabricate a solar cooker at the many adjustments in their life, but slowly the Barefoot College. women become more comfortable with the set-

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Here and left: Women from Gambia and Sierra Leone learn hands-on how to build and maintain solar equipment to electrify their villages.

thinkable—anywhere else in the world. But I’ve observed it myself: Removed from their traditional setting, conservative Muslim women from Jordan have eagerly asked to go into a church to see how their Christian friends from Africa worship. This type of thing happens during their training time together, as if it is the most natural thing in the world. It’s a kind of miracle!

While the presence of so many nationalities creates a positive environment of cultural diversity, it also creates

many challenges, the most pressing of which is communication. With the help of the women, we have developed a unique combination of hand gestures, signs, and some terms and phrases (expressed in broken English) that allow the trainers and trainees to communicate in a common “language.” It’s also interesting to note that the women, in their own inimitable way, record what they are learning in rough drawings, color codes, and scribbles that they alone can understand. These tatty notebooks serve as their manuals when they return back home and need to review what they’ve learned.

“Learning by doing” has long been the philosophy adopted by the Barefoot College. Practical demonstrations, “handson” experience, and regular repetition help trainees become familiar with terms, tools, equipment, and components used in solar technology. With each passing day, their level of hesitancy decreases and their confidence and technical dexterity increase. They return home as “barefoot” solar engineers who will fabricate, install, maintain, and repair residential solar lighting systems in their villages.

A future so bright

A “barefoot revolution” is sweeping the world. Ordinary people—once written off by a society that labels them “poor,” “primitive,” or “backward”—are doing the extraordinary. What

Solar lanterns fabricated by women solar engineers in Mauritania provide clean light at night, eliminating the smoke of kerosene that damages the eyes and lungs of children in particular.

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Supporting Our Sisters These community-based organizations send Christian women to be trained as solar engineers. Contact them to offer your individual, small-group, or church support.

Benin Abed Ong abedongben@yahoo.fr

Malawi CCOD ccode@ccodemw.org

Cameroon Rural Women Development Centre ruwdec@yahoo.co.uk

Mali Aide de l’Eglise Norvegienne aen@afribone.net.ml

Congo (DRC) The Gorilla Organization henry@gorillas.org

Mozambique Catholic Mission tiendeny@gmail.com

Ethiopia Chancellor Mekele University gualmitiku@yahoo.com

Namibia OIKE nickeyg@unops.org

Kenya World Concern hesbonek@wcdro.org

Rwanda Norwegian Church Aid nca1@rwanda1.com

Green Forest Social Investment Trust ndiege@subagreenforest.com

Senegal TOSTAN mollymelching@tostan.org

the Barefoot College has effectively demonstrated is how sustainable the combination of traditional (barefoot) knowledge and demystified modern skills can be when the tools are put in the hands of the rural poor. Just as the sun—for which rural communities around the world already have great rever-

Barefoot Women Solar Engineers Association of Sierra Leone bwseaslorg2010@yahoo.com Tanzania International Child Support sam.wambura@icsafrica.org Uganda MIFUMI Project atukiturner@yahoo.com Zambia Norwegian Church Aid Oddbjorn.Flem@nca.no

ence—shines on the poorest of the poor, so now its power can be captured to illuminate their lives.

The beauty of our solar program is that it is easily replicated in the most inaccessible, neglected, and underrated communities of the world, from Gambia to Afghanistan and from Bhutan to Bolivia. And when the ideas, knowledge, and skills of the marginalized poor are used by them and for them, self-worth increases as dependency on longterm handouts decreases.

The dream is that one day the world’s most marginalized populations will stand on level ground with the rest of the human race.

Badakshan is the first Afghan village to be solar electrified by Barefoot College trainees.

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Sierra Leone Ministry of Finance and Economic Development tksid25@hotmail.com

To see the African women in action, watch the 10-minute video, narrated

by Bunker Roy, posted at tinyurl.com/3o7wnab.

Watch a recent CNN report at tinyurl. com/49fvr8e. Learn more at BarefootCollege.org.

Reaching for the Sun A modern-day Prometheus empowers the poorest of the poor interview by Kristyn Komarnicki and Janell Anema

photo: KRIS KRÜG

Bunker Roy is the founder and director of the Barefoot College in Rajasthan, northwestern India. In February he flew 8,000 miles to speak for eight minutes at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, where he addressed 500 women ministers and civil society leaders of developing nations on how his school is helping illiterate, middle-aged women light up their rural villages using solar technology.

We caught up with him in New York City, where we gladly gave him as many minutes as he needed to share his remarkable vision.

PRISM: You’ve been running the Barefoot College for four decades, but you’ve only been internationally recognized for your work in the past handful of years.

the creation of livelihoods for the poorest of the poor, among other things. What can you tell us about the evolution of your thinking?

Bunker Roy: Yes, but the recognition is not important. It’s nice to be endorsed, but I’m not in favor of personal recognition. I’m nobody without the Barefoot College, so please don’t recognize me, recognize the unique process and impact of the college.

BR: When you come from an elitist background where everything goes 100 miles per hour and all of a sudden you are in a village where everything goes zero miles per hour, you have to adjust. If you don’t, the people don’t take you seriously. You have to do things very, very slowly and carry the people with you. All we’ve done with the Barefoot College is to innovate slowly.

You’re never really sure that an idea will work until you’ve tried it. You look at the pros and cons, put it on the ground, and then you see the results. I’m a great believer in the evolutionary way and not the revolutionary way. The slow way forward is a very good way of seeing if an idea is grounded, if you’re carrying the people with you, if you are actually being understood, whether your sensitization process has had any impact. You have to give all your innovations time.

Churchill said that success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm. We’ve had several failures over the years—wind energy, some of our night school efforts, but even when something fails, it’s not necessarily the idea that has failed, it’s only the conditions around it that have contributed to the failure. It is so important that you try again and not accept failure.

PRISM: You went to elite schools and grew up in privileged circles. So when did you understand that you wanted to devote your life to empowering the poor? What turned the light on for you?

BR: I visited the very poor state of Bihar during a time of famine.

Hundreds of thousands of people had died of starvation. It was the first time I had ever been to rural villages, and it affected me deeply. When I went back and told my mother I wanted to work in a village, she looked shell-shocked—“You were all set to be a diplomat or a banker and now you want to live in a village?”

She wouldn’t speak to me for many years, and it was only when the Prince and Princess of Wales came and spent a day at the Barefoot College that she decided to break the silence.

PRISM: Did anyone else in your social set at the time understand your desire?

BR: No, this was something totally out of the box. In the 1970s this was beyond their comprehension. There was no money, no security, no future living and working in the villages. But I was drawn to the challenge of it, and I wanted to give back to society.

I had the best of education and now I wanted to give back.

PRISM: The college is involved in innovative ways of promoting education, healthcare, access to clean water and energy, and

PRISM: What is the biggest challenge you face in your work?

BR: The biggest threat to what we’re doing is the “literate person”—that is, you and me. Generally speaking, we can’t see beyond what we’ve been conditioned to see. We just can’t think beyond the box to see that there is often a low-cost—sometimes even a no-cost—way to do a thing. Where is it written that a person who can’t read or write can’t become a doctor, engineer, or architect?

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Literate people in the rural areas where we work believe in the status quo; they don’t believe in change. They are often corrupt, don’t believe in transparency, and don’t want the poorest to develop. They are the ones who always get in the way of our work, because they cannot accept for instance that a poor illiterate rural woman can become a solar engineer. They cannot accept something that they know will fundamentally change the man/woman relationship in the village. They know the effect it will have.

We expect objections. In fact, when we go into a village and find that everyone is for the project, we know that something is wrong—someone has to object. If the right people object—if the moneylenders, politicians, bureaucrats object—then we know we’re on the right track. As an organization, we have to have the staying power to counter all that resistance and hostility.

When we go to the poorest part of the village and start doing work, as we always do, we generate a lot of flack. The literate people ask, “Why them? Why not us? Why aren’t you going through the proper hierarchy?” And we answer, “Because we’re not interested. We’ve been going through the proper hierarchy for years and nothing’s changed.”

In just that one act—bypassing the literate folks—we shortcut years of discrimination, exploitation, and injustice. In a village of 100 houses, 30 households will be very poor. The Barefoot College will only work with those 30 households. I will make sure that they get the visibility, that they stand out and are treated as equals. That is the big step—to get the resources and confidence to the very poor so that they are able to stand eye to eye with the others in the village. They can’t do it without the backing of the Barefoot College.

The poorest people may be illiterate, but they are just in need of direction, leadership, support. If you’re fighting bonded labor, injustice, exploitation, corruption, and there’s no one to support the people, you won’t see any change. When they feel that the Barefoot College will support them all the way, then they get the confidence to take on these things. But that sort of spark must come from the village, not from the college. They have to take the first step—we can’t push them.

PRISM: You dealt exclusively with Indian villages until 2004, when you decided to begin working in Africa. How do you find villages to work with? Please describe your process of selection.

BR: We looked at the United Nations Human Development Report and started with the country at the bottom of the list— Sierra Leone—and worked our way up. Since 2005 we have covered Chad, Niger, Rwanda, Mozambique, Benin, Mauritania, Djibouti, Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, the Gambia—all the African countries we work in come from the bottom of the poorest nations on the list.

We partner with about 22 indigenous grassroots NGOs that are already working in the rural areas. They are our eyes and ears; they identify the villages for us and do the sensitization before I arrive. They tell the people that the following week I will arrive in the hopes of taking one or two of their grandmoth-

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ers to India. They think it is one big joke, and they have a big laugh. The village is supposed to do a preselection in that time. Then I show up and have to confirm that the person is genuinely very poor, illiterate, etc. This first round is very important.

PRISM: Are the women who are selected very excited? Is there fierce competition?

BR: Oh, no! No one lines up for this. They hate the idea.

They think, “What a crazy thing to do! I’m so happy here with my grandchildren, my dogs and cats, my family, my land. Why would you want to take me to a strange place and make me into a solar engineer?” They’re 50 years old, most of them— they want to relax.

When the village sends the women off, it’s as if it’s the last time they’ll ever see them again. It’s a very somber, sad occasion. The women go screaming onto the plane. But what guts they have! They’ve never been out of their village before, let alone on a plane, and now they are going to a strange country with strange people, strange clothes, strange food. The first month it is very difficult for them to settle in, but after that they really get into it. They start to laugh and joke; they talk to each other, even though they don’t understand a word of each other’s languages!

PRISM: Tell us about some of your most memorable students.

BR: I went to a village in Gambia where all the prepa-

Do What Works: Rethinking the Millennium Development Goals In 2005, the New York Times published an op-ed by Bunker Roy titled “Why the Millennium Goals Won’t Work.” Here’s a bullet list of his proposed solutions, all of which the Barefoot College has already proven to be both feasible and effective: Goal 1 Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger: Get every government to embrace a Right to Information Act (like India’s). Ensure transparency and accountability by allowing rural communities to pressure government to disclose how money has been spent (see Transparency.org).

Goal 2 Achieve universal primary education: Since 60 percent of the poorest rural children miss school because they have to help with domestic chores, train literate but unemployed rural youth as part-time “barefoot” teachers who then run schools at night.

Goal 3 Empower women: Train illiterate rural women as solar and water engineers—to repair hand pumps, build rainwater tanks in schools, solar electrify villages.

Goals 4-6 Reduce child mortality, improve maternal health, and combat disease: Upgrade the skills of traditional midwives, improve their confidence, and build on their knowledge.

Goal 7 Increase access to safe drinking water: Collect rainwater from the roofs of schools by the billions of gallons, for drinking and flushing toilets.

Goal 8 Develop partnerships: Rather than focus on global trade partnerships, strengthen partnerships between poor communities so that they learn from one another and share traditional, practical knowledge and skills.

ratory work had been done, and they had come to the stage where they were supposed to pick a grandmother to send. About 100 people were at the meeting, and I just observed initially, but I had already spotted the woman that I wanted to take.

After about two hours’ discussion they announced the two women they had selected, but I said, “No, this woman will go,” pointing to the person I had already decided was the best to take. They were very surprised, and asked how I could possibly have decided on her when I didn’t know the language or who she was or whether they had already ruled her out for some reason I couldn’t know about. I explained that I liked her humility, her body language, how she responded to the others, and could tell that she was the one to take. They informed me, “Well, in fact, we want to send her, but she has a difficult husband, and he won’t let her go.”

I said, “Bring me the husband,” and here comes this swaggering, cocky, typical male chauvinist West African, with a mobile phone in his hand. I said, “I want to take your wife to India.”

He said, “It’s not possible. Look how beautiful she is. What happens if she runs off with an Indian man?”

I said, “I promise that if you send her to India she will ring you up every week on your mobile and tell you she is happy, she hasn’t run off with any man, she is working hard at the Barefoot College.”

So at that point the whole village piled onto him and said, “Look, you must say yes—he’s given his assurance.” So very reluctantly he agreed.

This woman was definitely battered, very badly treated. She came to us like a grandmother, but she went back to her village like a tiger! She walked off the plane like a veteran, and handled the Gambian press as if she’d handled it her whole life. She went and solar electrified her whole village. The only casualty was the husband, because he couldn’t recognize the woman who returned to him. What a success story she is!

PRISM: These women are your heroes, aren’t they?

BR: Oh yes. I just give them an opportunity, that’s all. They find within themselves a way to capitalize on this new skill they have.

PRISM: So when these women return to their villages empowered for the first time in their lives, what happens? What are some of the social consequences of this work?

BR: I’ll tell you about the first women we trained from Afghanistan. When they went back and solar electrified the first Afghan village ever, one of the women went and sat down with the men.

“What do you think you’re doing sitting here with the men?” they asked her. “You should be sitting with the women over there.”

And she very quietly answered, “Today I am not a woman.

Today I am an engineer. I have solar electrified the whole village, so I have every right to sit here.” And the men didn’t have any answer, because they had never seen a woman engineer in their life.

This is how change happens. The men changed the opinion they had about women by seeing that they can also be engineers

and not just work in the kitchen and produce babies. It had a fantastic effect. Those three women have gone on to train 27 more women in Afghanistan. Once you give them a skill that the man doesn’t have, you open up opportunities and the sky’s the limit. They will fly with it. Their whole position in society has now changed.

We have this mother from Jordan with us now. She was at the college for one month when all of the sudden she got a telegram saying she had to return home because her children were ill. So she went back and found that her husband was not looking after the children properly and had sent the telegram just to bring her home. So in front of the whole village—and this is historic—she said, “You will not stop me from going back to India now. I’m coming back here as a solar engineer. Then I’m going to train all the women in this village to become solar engineers, and none of you are going to do anything about it.”

That required tremendous guts. In a traditional society no woman gets up and starts challenging and questioning men like that. She’s back at the college right now, training. She says that when she goes back to Jordan she’s going to tell everyone, “If I can become a solar engineer, even though I don’t read or write, all of you can become something, too.” She’s a very powerful ambassador—there is so much fire in her eyes when she speaks.

PRISM: What kind of donors do you look for? How can our readers partner with the work you’re doing?

BR: We look for donors who understand that this work takes time. We have a lot of Christian organizations working in Africa and they’re all success stories. Out of 194 grandmothers, about 90 of them are Christians, and we’d love to have your readers connect with some of these local organizations that are open to scaling up, for example in Malawi. Since the Indian government has agreed to pay airfare and six months’ training costs for as many grandmothers as we can train—currently we’re limited by our size to training 72 a year—we need support to help the women who have trained in India train others in their native areas. And we need funds for hardware—it costs about $40,000 for the solar panels for a village of 100 houses. That’s the kind of thing churches can help with.

PRISM: Thank you, Mr. Roy, for serving Jesus by serving the most vulnerable members of the human family. Thank you for adding so much light to these women’s lives and, by extension, to our lives as well.

Kristyn Komarnicki, editor of PRISM Magazine, is telling everyone who will listen about Bunker Roy and the solar grannies, some of whom she hopes to meet one day. She is thankful every time she flips a light switch.

Janell Anema is an adjunct professor of community development at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pa., and while much in the field of international development leaves her feeling cynical and disillusioned, in a few hours Bunker Roy managed to electrify her hope and passion for community development again!

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