Grandmas Trained as Solar Engineers & Other Marvels of Barefoot College

Students and faculty were captivated, challenged, and inspired by Bunker Roy and Meagan Fallone, who recently described how their work at the renowned Barefoot College empowers poor, illiterate women all around the world.

Roy founded the Barefoot College in 1972 with the goal of helping villagers in India improve their living standards. Since then, the college has taught thousands of Indian women to become technically proficient. Fallone, a former business executive and mother of three sons, has for the past five years spearheaded the college’s global outreach, which has seen the college enroll hundreds of women from more than 70 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Long before Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen concluded that the key to combating rural poverty in the developing world is giving women a greater voice and role in village life, Roy set up the Barefoot College in the village of Tilonia, deep in the heart of Rajasthan, an arid, poor state in western India. A self-effacing and energetic man who is also a graduate of the distinguished Doon School in northern India, Roy has for decades selflessly devoted himself to sustaining the Barefoot College, a unique institution that twice a year houses roughly 50 middle-aged women for six months and teaches them useful and practical skills, such as how to construct and maintain solar cookers and solar lamps or how to make crafts and other items that they can sell.

When these women return to their villages with their new skills and some of the fruits of their labors at the college, they transform their villages, first, by raising the quality of life by bringing electricity to their villages with their new devices, and, second, by changing the traditional social dynamic by emerging as role models for the other women in the village and awing men with their useful expertise.

In their lecture at Groton School, Roy and Fallone explained that the college carefully selects as its students grandmothers, who upon their return teach their children and grandchildren what they have learned at the Barefoot College. Fallone and Roy call these grandmothers, who, unlike most grandmothers in the western world, are usually still in their 40s (if not late 30s), “force multipliers” because these women reach so many more people than could actually attend the college.

The impressive track record of the Barefoot College led Time magazine in 2010 to recognize Roy as one the 100 most influential people in the world.

After the lecture, about 50 particularly curious and enthusiastic students peppered Roy and Fallone with questions for more than an hour and a half at a reception at the Headmaster’s House. Fallone described how inspiring it is to see women from different regions of the world work together at the college and develop friendships while building circuit boards.

Roy challenged the students to reconsider the role of their education by pointing out that few so-called educated people, including some of the brightest minds at places such as Harvard, can do the work that the illiterate women of the world have shown Roy that they can do when given the opportunity.—Tom Lamont P'09, '12, '15, history teacher

Learn more about the Barefoot College at http://www.barefootcollege.org.

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