Barefoot College turns illiterate grandmothers into solar engineers

Across rural Africa, Asia and the Pacific, villages sit beyond the reach of the electricity grid. Kerosene is the default light: expensive, smoky and dangerous, and grid connection costs are out of reach for communities like Vunidogoloa in Fiji, where one family spent about $50 a week on kerosene.

Train illiterate grandmothers as solar engineers in a six-month hands-on course — no lectures, no diplomas — then send them home to electrify their villages.

Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan selects women aged roughly 35 to 50, deliberately not the most educated, and puts them through six months of boarding-school training that teaches soldering, wiring and charge controllers by colour codes, pictograms and demonstration instead of textbooks. Graduates go home with solar kits, install and maintain them, and charge households a small monthly fee; in Zanzibar each graduate receives 25 kits and connects her village.

The model spread from India to 93 countries. In Zanzibar, 65 women trained since 2015 had connected 1,858 houses across 29 villages by early 2025; a Pacific pilot run with UN Women electrified Fijian villages from 2012 and grew into a five-country programme. The 2012 documentary Solar Mamas, following Jordanian Bedouin Rafea, won a Peabody Award and made the term famous.

Bunker Roy founded the Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan believing that the solution to rural poverty lives in the village, not in credentials. Its boldest experiment trains women — grandmothers, most of them unable to read — to become solar engineers. Selection is deliberately counter-intuitive: candidates should be over 35, hold some standing in the village, and not be too educated, because educated women leave for cities while grandmothers stay.

The six-month course at Tilonia teaches students to assemble LED lamps, charge controllers and home lighting systems without a single lecture. Students learn by colour-coded circuits and repetition, and sit a practical, not a written, exam. The hardware supply chain follows them home: panels and kits are shipped to their villages, where the new engineers install systems, maintain them, and collect a small monthly household fee — turning a training course into a standing rural utility run by women who were previously counted as dependants.

The idea scaled by replication rather than franchise. UN Women Pacific partnered with the college in late 2011; ten Fijian women graduated in September 2012, expected to power at least 500 homes, and 24 more women from five Pacific nations formed the next intake. Zanzibar built its own campus: 65 women trained there since 2015 connected 1,858 houses in 29 villages. The documentary Solar Mamas (2012), which followed Rafea, a Bedouin mother of four from a poor Jordanian desert village, won a Peabody and carried the term into ordinary vocabulary.

Kerosene lighting is expensive, smoky and unsafe, and grid extension to remote villages costs far more than distributed solar — the demand was already there.

Training grandmothers rather than young men or educated women keeps skills in the village: they are respected, they stay put, and their appointment shifts norms about what illiterate women can be.

Teaching without written materials made the course open to anyone, and the practical exam matched the actual job of wiring and repairing panels.

The monthly household fee made each solar mama a small enterprise, so the installations got maintained instead of decaying — the usual fate of donated equipment.

Formal literacy is a poor proxy for talent. Pick the people a community already trusts and teach by demonstration: the skills stay in the village instead of leaving for the city.

The programme grew into regional campuses in Zanzibar, Burkina Faso, Liberia, Guatemala, Fiji and Senegal, so women no longer travel to India. Chalmers University researchers studying the solar mamas concluded the course breaks down stigmas by showing that people without formal education can become experts and community leaders — published in Nature Energy in 2024. Rafea, the Jordanian grandmother of the film, went home as her country's first female solar engineer and kept training women of her tribe. Zanzibar now gives each graduate 25 solar kits outright — infrastructure, not charity.