The story he had to tell was incredible. Yet, it is very plausible and realistic.
The countries of Africa have a great advantage in that they have the sun in abundance. If photovoltaic technology on PV is used in a massive way, it can provide cheap or free electricity and the Dark Continent can make huge steps forward.
The story told at the recent Innovation Convention held by the European Commission in Brussels said that hundreds of illiterate grandmothers were taken from their villages in Africa, sent over the ocean to India, where they mixed with other grandmothers, illiterate as well, and using just sign language learnt in six months how to assemble PV kits and more importantly maintain them once they are back at their villages.
This is the brainchild of Bunker Roy, founder and director of the Barefoot College in India, the only fully solar electrified college in the desert of Rajasthan, the only college built by the poor and managed by the rural poor who earn less than one dollar a day, almost the only college left in India that respects and practises the work style and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi
In the past 20 years, the demystified and decentralised community-based Barefoot approach has been implemented in over 50 of the Least Developed Countries: a total of 45,000 houses in 1,024 villages have been solar electrified by nearly 300 illiterate rural grandmothers.
Bunker was identified as one of the 50 environmentalists who could save the planet by The Guardian in 2008 and as one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2010.
He was speaking in the session “Innovation in Adversity: Is necessity the mother of invention?”
Why grandmothers? The rationale behind the choice is quickly explained: the power and influence, let alone the authority, of a grandmother in a traditional village are unassailable. And, Bunker added to a huge cheer from the audience, men are untrainable because they are too restless.
It takes some doing to persuade a grandmother to leave everything and go abroad, for the first time in her life, mix with grandmothers coming from other countries with whom she cannot communicate except through sign language and be trained, also in sign language, how to assemble a PV pack and how to maintain it and keep it in working order.
These women have never been exposed to literacy, to formal education and yet, using the ‘leapfrog’ principle, end up working with an advanced technological tool, the PV panel
Bunker Roy gave slightly different figures for his achievement: so far, 600 grandmothers from 64 countries have been trained, lighting up 1200 villages and changing forever the life of 500,000 people in these 64 countries.
Before him, another Indian, RA Mashelkar, had spoken about his childhood when he had to take three buses to get to school. He spoke about access equality despite adversity, of affordable excellence and agreed with what Bunker Roy was to say about a low-cost approach to teaching and innovation.
Closer to home, Hanan Dowidar from Egypt described the many initiatives set in motion after the Arab Spring, all aiming to develop self-help among the disenfranchised people of Cairo such as organic farming, exchange tourism, rooftop farming, and a cute app which tells drivers in Cairo where the worst traffic jams are so that they can avoid them.
She is currently vice-president of the Forum for Mediterranean Innovation in Action (FEMIA), a newly-established association that aims to promote and implement innovative actions towards sustainable development in the Mediterranean.