Second-year graduate student, Lauren Remedios from Bangalore, India, returned to her home country last year to design a Barefoot Solar Monitoring and Evaluation Toolkit for Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan to measure the impacts of the solar energy initiative on women’s empowerment, quality of life, and environmental sustainability.
A “Barefoot Solution” of Solar Energy begun in 1986, answered the electrical needs of the rural poor without jeopardizing natural /non-renewable sources. It started by training semi-literate Indian women to become Barefoot Solar Engineers, thus challenging the assumptions of formal education. Barefoot College demystified solar technology making it available to poor and neglected communities in sixty-four countries. Annually, around sixty semi-literate/unschooled women from least developed countries assemble in Tilonia, Rajasthan, and immerse themselves in a six-month solar engineering training program. The women train to create, install, repair, and maintain solar home lighting systems. Additionally, the solar engineers learn to fabricate solar cookers and solar water heaters. This training takes place in a hands-on and practical environment; the women learn by hand-signals, colors, and drawings because no one speaks a common language at the training campus. Upon returning to their villages, the women electrify each household in their communities with solar power by installing photovoltaic systems.
In her capstone project, Lauren designed a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) toolkit for the Barefoot Solar Initiative to measure the impact of access to renewable energy. This toolkit will be used in sixty-four countries that have implemented the Solar Initiative and will be translated into thirty-six different languages.
Barefoot’s ground partners, i.e. the local NGO that provides logistic support in each country, will use the M&E kit. Lauren’s kit will ensure the NGO’s active role in monitoring and strategic decision-making, tracking impacts and outcomes. Most importantly, the M&E toolkit is flexible to changing interventions in different countries and contexts.
Barefoot College is a complex multi-level organization that, until now, has had no formal M&E system. The main thrust of Lauren’s project was to investigate and assess the solar implementation in rural communities, to develop indicators, and design the M&E toolkit to facilitate Barefoot College.
“Our ability to analyze impact on a global scale was at last facilitated by Lauren’s ability to bridge a grass roots mission with a global vision,” said Meagan Fallone, Global strategy and development officer at Barefoot College.
About The Barefoot College:
In 1971, Sanjit “Bunker” Roy set up Barefoot College in a small community called Tilonia in Rajasthan, India. The drive to set up the College was and is to find simple, sustainable, and local solutions to water, renewable energy, education, healthcare, and livelihood. Following the lifestyle of Gandhi, the College is the only organization built by the poor, for the poor, and for the last forty-three years, it is managed, controlled, and owned by the poor.
– More information about The Barefoot College is available at www.barefootcollege.org
– Barefoot College TED Talk http://www.ted.com/talks/bunker_roy.html?embed=true
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