Barefoot College Uplift

Barefoot College is a globally operating NGO that specializes in solving rural poverty. We do this by providing access to and control of clean, renewable energy for rurally poor communities as the foundation to creating stable energy access over time, clean water access, communications and internet access, educational, vocational and skills training access, and micro-enterprise creation and economic opportunity initiatives. Barefoot College was originally founded to help desert communities in Rajasthan, India, to access water, but we have in the past decade become leading experts in the provision of solar technology and the engineering training to go with it to rurally poor communities. We believe that leveraging renewable energy and control of this resource for rurally poor communities is the fastest way to help them achieve a higher quality of life that is sustainable over the long term.  

At Barefoot College we are committed to solving extreme rural poverty. We give people living in these circumstances the tools and knowledge to take charge of their own development and livelihoods over the long-term, so that positive change can be maintained and continued in the future. We do this by training unemployed, and largely uneducated women as Solar Engineers, and by educating them in a literacy optional curriculum of digital and financial literacy, civil and human rights, health and reproductive health, and microenterprise creation. We then provide the communities these women live in with the tools necessary for their female Solar Engineers to electrify their homes, access clean water, and set up internet access for educational, vocational and entrepreneurial purposes. We assist communities in leveraging these resources into productive and financially viable livelihoods and small business creation. Our work elevates humanity by transformatively improving lives in extremely marginalized rural regions.

Globally 800 million people live without access to electricity (https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/09/millions-east-africans-who-need-electricity-data-shows-renewable-energy-most-viable-affordable-solution). Many of these people live in extreme rural poverty in regions where traditional grid infrastructure solutions to this problem are not feasible. Without electricity households must use harmful fuels, such as kerosene, for lighting and cooking, and they also lack access to clean water with anything more than a handpump well. Lack of lighting after dark ensures that children cannot complete homework, and that families cannot work after dark. Lack of abundant clean water means lower frequencies of washing and increased incidence of diseases related both to a lack of hygiene and increased waterborne diseases. Communities lacking these basic resources therefore show higher levels of children not attending school, or leaving school early, especially in the case of girls who begin menstruating and can no longer attend school due to a lack of facilities. This in turn contributes to rampant gender inequality in rurally poor communities, where women are not educated, and are taught that this is normal. In working to solve extreme rural poverty it is therefore extremely clear that clean energy access is the central problem that needs to be addressed.

Barefoot’s programs work very simply. First, we identify rurally poor communities that cannot have their energy, water, education and economic problems solved through traditional means such as grid infrastructure, whether for geographic reasons or otherwise. We then partner with these communities, which select women from amongst their members by consensus to be trained as Solar Engineers. We train these women in how to build and maintain solar facilities and we educate them in our ENRICHE curriculum which teaches through literacy-optional methods digital and financial literacy, health and reproductive health, civil and human rights, and microenterprise creation. We then provide communities with the equipment they need for their female Solar Engineers to electrify homes and set up clean water access, internet access, educational and vocational training programs, and begin training their fellow community members to leverage clean energy access into business creation. The overall effect of this process is to transform the lives of the rurally poor into a state of agency, control over their own development, and as livelihood creation takes place into financial stability. The goal of these changes is to create significant quality of life improvements that maintain over the long-term. 

Our project serves communities living in extreme rural poverty, with a focus on providing tangible benefit especially to women, and to marginalized groups within communities that are sidelined from decision making, education and equal opportunities. The primary beneficiaries of our project are the 800 million people who currently live globally without electricity, amongst whom inequalities such as gender inequality are more pronounced than in prosperous communities due to economic and social hardship. The first step Barefoot takes when partnering with any community is for Barefoot team-members to spend time with community members in order to ensure we understand what they wish to achieve from partnering with Barefoot, and in order to understand their traditions and their needs and how these will factor into project participation. We also establish a ground partner for every community project; this is a local organization partner that has long-term familiarity with the region and with the community. We do this to ensure that Barefoot consistently meets the needs of any community we work with, and to make it clear that communities have local support and a local voice. Over time, as the community takes charge of the project themselves, this relationship can continue. 

Economic, technological, political and social growth in recent decades has meant that the wealth gap between prosperous global regions and those which are extremely impoverished has grown larger than ever before. Very remote, rural areas of extreme poverty are at serious risk of being left behind in any programs that seek to address poverty in easily accessible or urbanized regions; they are also at risk of being left behind politically and cut out of the global communications loop that those in urbanized environments can take for granted. People in these regions are perhaps the most in need globally of elevation. 

Barefoot College was first founded 48 years ago as an NGO providing clean water access to impoverished communities in Rajasthan, India. Over time, the organization has developed its operations to work with rurally poor remote communities around the world. Since the 90s, Barefoot has been interested in the viability of solar power as a way to assist impoverished communities in the global south, but it was not until recently that it became clear to us that transforming the lives of rurally poor communities is a process that needs to be addressed through solving energy, water AND educational problems together. The impetus for this solution came from the Ghandian philosophy on which Barefoot was first founded, which states that all people should have the right live happy, fulfilling and dignified lives. As solar technology and literacy-optional learning technology such as tablet based apps have become cheaper and more accessible in recent decades, Barefoot has created programs that use access to clean energy as the first step in a systematic process of change that is geared towards solving not just one problem, but building on each solution to create an improvement in quality of life across the board for rurally poor communities. 

We are passionate about our project because there is no reason in the modern world that any community should be forced to live in poverty and squalor; the technology, resources and opportunities that allow people to transform their lives are modern realities. A large part of Barefoot College’s staff is made up of women who themselves come from communities with which Barefoot has partnered and helped to electrify; these women have over time sought to use their engineering and educational training to help others. Our management is also composed of a diverse array of individuals who have extensive experience understanding the damage that marginalization can do to not just communities but entire regions and nations. As a result, as an organization and as individuals we feel extremely passionate about bringing our solution to communities where it will make a difference to their lives, to their economic outcomes, and to their ability to live with dignity, self-respect and agency over their own development in the long-term. We are passionate not because the problem we solve is easy, but because it is soluble in a way that creates swift and massive improvements to the lives of those in need. 

Barefoot College is ideally positioned to deliver this project because we have the experience, the infrastructure, and the expertise to do so. Over the past ten years we have advanced our resources to the point that we now have fully operational Regional Training Centers on four continents capable of training and educating women as Solar Engineers and in the ENRICHE curriculum. We have also built these Centers up in concert with our global hub in Rajasthan, India, to function as campuses where additional livelihood training initiatives can take place, so as to ensure that regions can pivot their resources as needed; this is something that has been tremendously helpful to communities we work with during COVID-19, as, for example, our Tanzanian communities have been able to pivot resources towards manufacturing and selling reusable face-masks. Over 48 years of working with rurally poor communities we have evolved a full proof set of methodologies for understanding and meeting their needs as equal partners with respect; we have also become extremely adept at making partnerships with national, municipal and local governments, with other NGOs, and with private sector and corporate actors. This means that we have access to cutting edge developments in solar technology and educational skills that allow us to ensure we are continually developing and improving our programs and our solutions. We are best positioned to deliver this solution because we have spent extensive time making sure we have the best resources and methodologies in all areas to do so. 

In March, COVID-19 lockdowns stranded members of our staff and multiple trainees around the world. It also put communities we work with in a difficult situation in Tanzania due to the severe economic contraction that is currently occurring in Africa and elsewhere. Deliveries of electrification equipment were slowed, and our capacity to provide in-person guidance to communities on the ground was curtailed. To solve this we immediately put new programs in place with our shipping partners to ensure that equipment is still being delivered. We assisted businesses in the most hard hit regions we work with in pivoting one of their chief enterprises, the production of reusable sanitary napkins, to producing reusable facemasks along with disseminating information to prevent the spread of COVID-19. We have also designed and and planned a fully functional machine learning AI platform that works with our literacy-optional and solar powered internet educational programs to provide information on COVID-19 to our partner communities, but also to learn and grow in order to address questions on electrification, education, vocational training, farming and business to make up for in-person contact. We have not only dealt with the COVID-19 setback but made ourselves agile for crises in future. 

Barefoot College works on a systems change and partnership model of leadership that means we have multiple leaders contributing to our organizational progress at all times. This is because the global and extremely diverse cultural profile of our operations means that we need to be flexible in deploying the best leadership according to each situation in which we work. A strong example of this type of leadership is how Barefoot handled the closing of schools in India during COVID-19. Barefoot operates night schools for young people in our Indian communities using solar-powered internet access for resources, and school closures required that this stop as well; communities experienced significant upheaval as a result, not dissimilarly to our African communities referred to in the previous answer. To provide leadership Barefoot immediately developed and switched all curriculums for the night school into different online groups broken down according to each community’s technological access, which ranged from smartphones to non-smart mobile phones, and centrally used devices in communities. This result is somewhat unique due to the fact that unlike in more prosperous regions of the world, many rural and impoverished regions have simply not had access to online teaching and video conferencing. 

Our project is extremely innovative in its combination of solutions to problems into a single program. Often access to electricity, access to water, education, vocational training and economic opportunities are treated as separate problems; as are issues like gender equality and rural marginalization. Literacy is also normally a key part of programs seeking to address these problems, and a lack of literacy can be a huge barrier to success. Barefoot’s programs are innovative in their use of literacy optional color-coding and sign language based teaching. Our programs are extremely unusual, even unique, in their focus on addressing access to clean energy, water, education, economic opportunities and gender equality through leveraging solar electrification as the root of solution for all of these issues. Our approach to solving each type of problem means that its solution is interlocked with that of another problem; this makes the entire process that Barefoot communities go through more stable, and more guaranteed to produce concrete results that improve lives. Our work is disruptive of traditional, slow-acting solutions to energy access and to education in particular; it is also extremely innovative in terms of how it focuses on giving agency and developmental control and ownership of resources to communities. This is something that is hard to get right, and is often neglected; particularly where women are concerned. As a result our programs are unique in their ability to mobilize not just marginalized women but entire communities around them into creating lasting change that is scalable. 

Our theory of change is simple. We address the levers most central to creating a situation where poverty is reduced and quality of life is increased across the board to achieve transformative change. Our most important lever is access to and control over clean energy resources. This lever makes all other levels realistically soluble: water, education, vocational training, communications access, health information and long-term sustainability are all reliant on stable access to clean energy for communities that we work with. We also place significant emphasis on ensuring that communities control their own resources in this regard by training women as Solar Engineers from within each community. This is because long-term stability relies heavily in the case of all of our levers on the ability of a community to make decisions about their own development, and to be protected from the interests of outside parties that may not understand their needs in the long-term. This type of agency also makes communities more resilient to change and to crisis. In simple logical terms, we do the following in a causal chain. 

We identify communities in need. We ask communities to work with us. Communities take control of the process by selecting their own women to be trained as Solar Engineers. These women, once trained and educated in ENRICHE, are given materials to electrify their communities, and to set up water, internet, educational and vocational training access. Once this is done they begin educating their fellow community members in how leverage skills and knowledge to create microenterprises that earn money. This then begins to provide financial stability to communities such that they can invest in further training and education, and create larger businesses, which perpetuates over the long-term their new, increased state of elevated quality of life. This is kept constant by the fact that it is founded on long-term, self-controlled access to reliable and clean energy as the key lever.

Our project serves approximately 2.2 million people across over 90 countries. There are additional indirect beneficiaries – those living in proximity to electrified communities who are able to derive learning and benefit from education, vocational and business creation programs for instance – but as this number is extremely hard to calculate it is not included in our beneficiary figure. We aim to double this number by 2025; it is challenging to calculate numbers for 1 year due to the Covid-19 uncertainties of 2020, approximately 150,000 as of now, which we plan to ramp up.

This number is possible for us to achieve due to the huge number of beneficiaries that our Regional Training Centers are now able to serve. These Centers also mean that we are in a position to offer training and education to those who are not ready for full solar electrification of their communities, but require assistance in terms of their learning and vocational needs. Our Regional Centers will also allow us in the next two years to provide significantly higher levels of livelihood specific training that is appropriate to each region for maximum success and profitability; Centers will also be able to provide ongoing support, supervision and further developmental training to communities as this process goes on, significantly increasing the number of economic beneficiaries in our programs.  

Our primary goal within the next year is to rollout our machine learning AI platform to increase the access to information communities have. To assist communities with creating resilience and agility to situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic and to provide significantly higher levels of skills and livelihood specific training. Many of our fully electrified communities, especially those with fully set up night schools, have been able to continue learning, and if not wildly prospering have certainly benefited hugely from their energy, water, and education self-reliance. As a result we will also be working to assess where more fully functioning night schools can be implemented as a continuation of our work to ensure community resilience to natural disasters and to pandemics and health crises. The next five years will also see improvements to our current tablet-based, literacy optional skills based learning system that will build on our machine learning AI rollout; will see improvements to our solar technology and the ease of use of items such as portable solar lanterns and other solar items, which we aim to focus on disseminating to regions around fully electrified communities. In the shorter term as nations come out of lockdown, we also aim to continue improving the dissemination of information helping to tackle COVID-19 by helping our communities use their businesses – where appropriate, such as in the case of our Tanzanian communities producing reusable face masks and reusable sanitary napkins – as vehicles to spread helpful and educational material.

Our key barrier over the next year and over the next five years is resource, financial and personal. We are currently in a good position with regards to our access to technical, legal, cultural and market resources and entry points; we have been extremely fortunate in our work to build relationships with NGOs, private sector and governmental partners, and we have been similarly successful in creating an extremely high quality network of Regional Training Centers around the world. However, to get to this stage we have undergone relatively rapid expansion, and we project that this expansion will continue over the next five years. In order to continue making use of our resources and assisting more and more communities, as well as maintaining relationships with those that already work with us, we need to ensure continuing funding for our work. As we work based on a systems change partnership model and as we are not primarily a revenue generating organization, we do this by relying on funding from a diverse array of sources, including other NGOs, invested national governments, private sector and corporate actors who are interested in supporting our work. Maintaining this flow of funding from multiple sources is challenging, and can be disrupted by situations such as the current COVID-19 crisis, though we do not solely rely on any one organization for funding partnerships and purposes. 

Our plan to overcome this financial barrier is to proactively pursue funding awards and partnerships for our work that we feel we are deserving of and are a good fit for. We are also devoting and plan to continue devoting significant effort to continuing to build partnerships based on knowledge rather than funding; a key way in which we attract funding and plan to continue doing so is by creating excellence in our work and producing tangible improvements to lives through innovative use of cutting edge resources. We also intend to capitalize on the scalability of our programs – which are designed to be agile and customizable to scale far larger than simply serving a single rural community in a region – to improve buy-in and investment from governmental authorities in regions where we work. We have already had strong success in doing this with the governments of India, Zanzibar,Tanzania, Madagascar and Burkina Faso and have secured preliminary buy-in to be more engaged with our projects from the governments of New Zealand and Fiji, as well as Costa Rica. We will continue working to mobilize governmental resources as a key means to overcoming financial barriers to the success of our programs. In sum, we plan to leverage our existing resources and skills to continue securing funding. 

We work with over 100 ground partners in the form of local NGOs and CBOs around the world. This can be an organisation as big as WWF, or a local CBO in the Amazon rainforest. We also work with a number of multi-laterals, such as UNWomen and UNDP Small Grants. We work with a number of corporates, such as Apple, Hogan Lovells, Starbucks, and Credit Suisse, and Foundations such as the Swarovski Foundation, Coca Cola Foundation, Frey and Erol Foundations.

Our ground partners are organisations that are well established in working with the local communities in each country we work in. For instance, WWF is our main ground partner in Madagascar, and we have 25 ground partners in our Indian network of ground partners across 15 states. We have a global MOU with UNDP, through which our ground partners can apply for funds, primarily in Latin America, Africa and SE Asia. Corporates and Foundations are funding partners in parts of the world in Latam, Africa, India, SE Asia and the Pacific Islands.

We also work with governmental support in India, Zanzibar/Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Madagascar, New Zealand and Fiji.

We provide tangible benefits in the form of education and training services, as well as solar electrification equipment, to communities that we work with. Our key beneficiaries are communities living in rural poverty that are marginalized and left behind by improvements that are more easily achievable in less remote or in urbanized regions. They are in serious need of access to clean energy, often clean water, and to education and vocational training and well a viable economic opportunities for financial profit and stability. To deliver these services we work on a systems change and partnership model. We mobilize marginalized, uneducated women as an untapped resources and train them as Solar Engineers and as educators in digital and financial literature, civil and human rights, health and reproductive health and microenterprise creation. In doing so the equality situation in a community and the health and size of their adult workforce is immediately and vastly improved. We then provide equipment for female Solar Engineers to electrify their community, and we assist with the leveraging of the access to internet and other resources this brings to assist communities with creating viable and successful businesses. This creates revenue and stable economic opportunities that communities would otherwise simply not have access to. In addition to this, our programs meet the urgent demand in these regions for communities to feel that they have stable control over these improvements and that they can be owned and maintained for the long-term. 

Our path to financial sustainability is currently through large scale pursuit of grants, donations and funding partnerships with NGOs, governmental organizations, and private sector and corporate actors seeking to invest in our work. We derive these types of funding from a wide array of sources that mean we do not rely on a single organization for huge amounts of funding, but rather on smaller donations from many places. We have thus far remained abreast in terms of this funding with our needs, which has however been challenging due to our relatively rapid growth over the past years. We anticipate continuing with the same model in the future, albeit at a larger scale. 

Prior to Covid-19 our expenditure budget for 2020 was $4,843,707.

The Elevate Prize can help us by assisting us with our chief financial barrier; this would be a very significant award for us to win funding for, and would make a material difference to our ability to roll out new programs. We also feel that the access to other nominees and interested organizations involved in applying for the Elevate Prize could be hugely beneficial to us – and also to organizations with whom we might cross-pollinate and share knowledge in future.

Our two key areas in which we very much need assistance are funding and revenue generation and marketing, media and exposure. In terms of funding, as we have explained in other sections of this application, we are currently experiencing rapid growth. It is for this reason that we consider awards like MIT Solve to be vital for us to work to engage with; we are not simple interested in funding connections, but in connections and relationships that will enrich Barefoot’s ability to improve lives. We also feel that the expertise we have access to in terms of marketing, media and exposure could be significantly improved. Whilst we do have a strong profile within interconnected communities of organizations that we work with, we have not been able to divert significant resources to improving this profile in areas of the world that we do not yet work in.