Over 300 middle-aged, poor, illiterate women mostly grandmothers and mothers from all over Africa have been trained to become solar engineers at Barefoot college in Tilonia, a remote village in Rajasthan over the past 5 years.
For six months every year Tilonia hosts a certificate programme for a bunch of 40-odd women living in different least developed countries, say in the middle of Cameroon or in the middle of the Pacific, to come and learn the technical know-how to electrify their villages using solar technology.
The initiative is part of the government's India Technical Economic Cooperation (ITEC) solar engineering programme, which in 2008 adopted Tilonia's barefoot college as a training centre.
"Right now we have over 50 countries that we have covered in five years. Over three hundred women have been trained over five years. Twenty thousand houses have been solar electrified by these grandmothers in 160 villages all over the world. This is a success story for India," says Sanjit Bunker Roy, founder, Barefoot College.
Countries from Africa want to replicate Tilonia's Barefoot model in their own villages and create women entrepreneurs who can among other things operate and repair solar devices and thereby create a self sufficient village.
"...I have got an official request from the Zanzibar government to start a training centre. The Indian government has sanctioned 5 Barefoot training centres in Senegal, Liberia, Tanzania, and Burkina Faso," says Roy.
During the course, the women learn to assemble solar power circuits, mobile chargers, fixed solar units and lamps, which are then shipped to their villages when they return home.
"There is a contribution from the community from where these women come from. Once they go back to their villages these trained women run workshops from their houses to set up and repair solar units. Every family in the village which receives a solar light or lantern pays the village committee a sum that equals their kerosene, candles or other fuel consumption. A part of this forms the salary of the woman solar engineers," Meagan Fallone, an advisor to the Barefoot College, told PTI.
