Just an amazing story on participants in the Barefoot College, a school that teaches women to be solar engineers, even women who do not know how to read, write or speak the language. Sanjit Bunker Roy, an Indian educator, has since 2005 brought 140 women from Africa to India to be trained as solar engineers:
In India, they receive a six-month training course, taught in sign language and color codes, in which they learn to install, maintain and operate household, solar-powered lighting systems.
The women are taught to install integrated circuit boards for solar home lights and off-grid solar units generating up to 500 kilowatts per day. They are also taught to assemble simple solar lanterns and compact fluorescent lamps, parabolic solar cookers and solar water heaters.
Then they return home to electrify their villages.
According to Barefoot College, in the five years since Mr. Roy extended his program to Africa, the 140 women have provided solar power to 9,118 remote homes in 21 African countries.
"When people tell me there are no local solutions, I don't believe them," Mr. Roy said. "There is an indigenous solution everywhere."
When he started the college, Mr. Roy had no idea his reach would extend beyond India. His aim was to address the poverty and energy crisis that continues to plague rural India — where still, today, more than 70 percent of the country's nearly 1.2 billion people live.
According to Mr. Roy, about 40 percent of rural Indian households do not have access to electricity. More than 85 percent of them rely on kerosene for lighting and firewood for cooking.
. . .
In India and surrounding countries alone, the college has trained hundreds of women to electrify more than 600 villages from Kashmir to Bhutan, in remote parts of the Himalayas.
"The solar engineer grandmothers have proven that the impossible is possible," Mr. Roy said.
Read the whole article, it is powerful and forth the time spent reading.
I also found this to be an interesting view: "'Young people are untrainable,' he said. "They are obsessed with training certificates, which we do not provide, and once they get the training, they leave the village looking for money and opportunity in the city." In contrast, he said, older rural women are less likely to desert their villages for greener pastures."
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