Why must I read about this in the NYT and not in any of the 6 Indian dailies I go through every day?
–
Generating the Unlikeliest of Heroes
By NAZANIN LANKARANI
Courtesy: Newyork Times
Published: April 18, 2011
DOHA, QATAR — Persuading the Indian immigration authorities to grant entry visas to illiterate African grandmothers who claim to be trainee solar engineers is no easy task.
Yet, Sanjit Bunker Roy, an Indian educator, has, since 2005, succeeded in bringing 140 such women to the Barefoot College, a school he founded in 1972 in Tilonia, a village in Rajasthan State, about 95 kilometers, or 60 miles, from the state capital, Jaipur.
“Never in the history of Africa have so many women traveled so far away, for so long, to be trained as solar engineers, without knowing how to read, write or speak the language,” said Mr. Roy at the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha in November.
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.
Lack of access to electricity, he said, exposes rural people to serious health risks, impedes local economic development and contributes to rural migration. To combat those problems, Mr. Roy decided early on that his best weapons were illiterate grandmothers.
“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.
If that is a long-term advantage, it is also a large short-term challenge.
“The women are totally bewildered when they first arrive in a strange land,” Mr. Roy said. “On top of it, they are expected to become solar engineers. It is frightening prospect.”
Using what he calls a “demystified and decentralized” approach, Mr. Roy employs a staff of 400 to teach about 50 women per session at the college. The teachers themselves are illiterate grandmothers, all alumnae of the school.
“With every month in India, the women grow in stature and self-confidence,” he said. “They come as grandmothers and return as heroes to their village.”
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.
A partnership with India’s Foreign Ministry has provided support for the college’s program.
“The training program is fully funded by the government of India,” J.S. Mukul, joint secretary of the ministry’s technical economic cooperation division, said in an e-mail message.
“This includes return airfare, the course fee, a book allowance, accommodation, living allowance, study tour and emergency medical coverage during the trainees’ stay in India” Mr. Mukul said.
The government funding is provided under the Colombo Plan for Cooperative Economic and Social Development in Asia and the Pacific, a regional intergovernmental development program begun at the Commonwealth Conference on Foreign Affairs in Colombo, Sri Lanka in 1951.
“This is part of India’s effort to reach out to people at the grass-roots level,” Mr. Mukul said.
“We introduced an idea that was at first revolutionary,” Mr. Roy said. “Now it has been adopted as government policy.”
Grants from the United Nations Development Program and active partnerships with nongovernmental sustainable development organizations including the Skoll Foundation in the United States, the Fondation Ensemble in France and the Het Groene Woudt in the Netherlands have also increased the program’s reach.
The Skoll Foundation, which is focused on social entrepreneurship, has provided more than $2 million to the college since 2005 to help it to expand its program across Africa.
The local effects of the solar electrification program have exceeded even its founder’s expectations.
“When you start training grandmothers as solar engineers, you don’t think what the impact might be at the other end,” Mr. Roy said.
“Since 2006, a survey we conducted in Ethiopia found that over 500 babies were safely delivered in our solar-lit homes instead of using candle or kerosene lighting,” he said. “In Malawi, rats, scorpions and snakes are no longer entering solar-lit homes, reducing the risk of bites.”
“In Sierra Leone, refrigeration for immunization products is mostly done by solar electrified equipment,” he said. “Bringing solar light to villages has made a world of difference.”
Nongovernmental organizations are playing a central role in spreading word of the program and implementing it outside India.
In 2006, Christèle Adedjoumon, a Benin-born energy project manager with the Beninese Association for Mobilization and Development, a nonprofit organization founded in 1992, visited the Barefoot College.
“The program seduced me because it sought to autonomize populations,” Ms. Adedjoumon said in an interview from Paris. “It is about developing know-how, not giving handouts. Rather than give the people a fish, it teaches them how to fish,”
The following year, two women from Hon, a remote village south of Cotonou, Benin’s main city, were selected by Ms. Adedjoumon and Mr. Roy to train at the college.
“Rural women have little power and self confidence,” Ms. Adedjoumon said. “Trainee selection is often difficult because their husbands are reluctant to let their women leave.”
Still, the training the Beninese women received turned out to be a life-changing experience for them and for their community.
In 2009, with the help of its two new solar engineers, 308 solar systems were installed in Hon to light up about 3,000 households.
According to Ms. Adedjoumon, each subscribing household pays about $3.30, a month.
The money is used to maintain the equipment, purchase distilled water for the batteries and pay the engineers.
“The grandmothers are always paid a salary as solar engineers,” Mr. Roy said. “The community recognizes the value of the service they provide.”
“The schools now have good, clean lighting, the streets are lit, the entire face of the village has changed,” Ms. Adedjoumon said.
According to Ms. Adedjoumon, efforts by the Beninese government to install and operate solar panels in other parts of the country have largely failed, because city-based engineers will not venture out to remote villages to repair equipment.
In February, two more grandmothers were selected from Zalime, a village near Hon, to train this summer at the college.
“We will set the example that solar energy can be a success in Benin,” Ms. Adedjoumon said.
In the meantime, Mr. Roy continues to train women across Africa.
Last year, he was summoned by Ernest Bai Koroma, the president of Sierra Leone, to start a training program there.
Today, construction of the first Barefoot College training center in Sierra Leone is under way. Mr. Roy is selecting the first 150 grandmothers who will train there to become solar engineers.
In his closing remarks at the Doha conference, Mr. Roy quoted Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win.”
Related
-
A Silkworm’s Thread of Color and Hope (April 18, 2011)
-
Out of Disaster, a Burst of Enthusiasm for Bicycling (April 18, 2011)
-
Substitutes for Bisphenol A Could Be More Harmful (April 18, 2011)
0 ಪ್ರತಿಕ್ರಿಯೆಗಳು