Barefoot power

Sanjit Bunker Roy, founder of Barefoot College in India focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship to address social problems, and his story is serving as an inspiration for the budding Chinese philanthropic industry.

Roy, a leading figure in the Indian NGO community for the past 30 years, founded the Barefoot College in 1972 with the aim of using traditional knowledge and sustainable technology to help the impoverished in the desert region in Tilonia, Rajasthan, India become financially independent.

Using grants from the government of Rajasthan (40 percent), international donors (40 percent) and its own activities (20 percent), Roy also travels extensively in developing countries, seeking potential students.

"China and India are facing the same problem regarding climate change, and under these circumstances, I would like to help train Chinese 'barefoot woman' solar engineers in India," Roy told the China Global Philanthropy Forum held in Beijing on December 1-2.

Roy has extended the Barefoot College's programs, training a growing number of formerly impoverished female solar-power engineers, who will be fully responsible for maintaining and repairing solar installations.

"They now have light and electricity from a clean source. They no longer need to spend their limited income on candles or kerosene. Using solar cookers can reduce their fuel use and provide a clean safe way to cook meals," Roy says, adding that the Barefoot College itself consists of over 80,000 square feet and is completely powered by solar energy.

To date, Barefoot College has solar electrified some 350 villages across India and dozens more in sub-Saharan Africa and even war-torn Afghanistan.

His college takes men, women and children who are illiterate and semi-literate from the lowest castes and trains them to become "barefoot" water and solar engineers, architects, teachers, communicators, pathologists, midwives, IT workers, accountants, and marketing managers.

The 63-year-old social entrepreneur was educated at elite Indian schools on a path to medicine or diplomatic service before he founded the Barefoot College.

When he came face to face with a devastating famine that killed thousands in the Indian state of Bihar over 30 years ago, his true vocation was suddenly revealed.

After he received his formal college education, to his mother's astonishment, Bunker Roy began building wells for the rural poor in Rajasthan.

In his first five years of living and working in the villages, Roy explains that his "real education started".

The urban elite often considered the villagers uneducable, but Roy realized that they possessed tremendous knowledge and skills. The village experts - the midwives, water diviners, and bone setters - drew from wisdom and capabilities beyond what one learns in a typical classroom, he says.

As Roy explained, these are "people with grit, determination, and the amazing ability to survive with almost nothing." They live "a hard life with grace, and dignity, and self-respect".

It was clear that the villagers should not have to depend on outside experts - they were competent, and better served by learning practical skills and developing their own technology infrastructures.

The college has also demonstrated how to live without using fossil fuels (diesel and kerosene) for lighting and cooking; how to practice the age-old technology of collecting rainwater without over- exploiting ground water for drinking water and sanitation.

Skoll Foundation, established in 1999 by eBay's first president, Jeff Skoll, has also provided financial support to replicate the Barefoot approach in solar electrification and roof top rainwater harvesting for drinking water and sanitation in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Cameroon and Bolivia.

The Barefoot College's $1 million Alcan Prize for Sustainability was used to replicate the barefoot model in even more villages in these countries.

"Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village," Roy says.

According to Roy, the teaching begins in the classroom, run by instructors who themselves have little or no formal education and instruction is delivered with a mix of body language, a few essential terms in English, and a lot of hands-on practice.

The idea of self-reliant learning was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi and the legendary American author Mark Twain, says Roy.

Gandhi's ideas and beliefs have been practiced in the Barefoot College for over 34 years.

"Like Mahatma Gandhi we do believe power resides in the poor," Roy says, believing that he has the obligation to help the poor develop the capability to look after themselves.

His favorite saying of Gandhi's is: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

"And Mark Twain said: 'Never let school interfere with your education.' School is something that you learn in a classroom, such as reading and writing. Education is what you learn from the family, from the environment, from the community," Roy says.

Roy has also sought to promote the standardization of social auditing to render the Indian voluntary social sector more transparent, effective, reliable and accountable.

Roy points out the Barefoot College is the only community-based organization in India that has publicized and opened its audit books for the past 10 years.

The term "Barefoot College" is both literal and symbolic. Millions of people in India live and work barefoot; but the title is also used as a symbol of respect for the knowledge that the poor have.

(China Daily 11/10/2008 page8)