Barefoot College's Solar Mamas — Training Rural Women as Solar Engineers

Barefoot College began in 1972 in Tilonia, Rajasthan, as the Social Work and Research Centre, founded by Sanjit "Bunker" Roy. From 2008, supported by India's Ministry of External Affairs (ITEC programme) and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, it developed the "Solar Mama" model.

Six-month, hands-on courses train rural women — many illiterate or semi-literate, often grandmothers — to build, install and repair solar lighting systems, deliberately bypassing formal literacy requirements. Each community sets up an Energy Committee, required to include at least 30% women, which collects a small monthly household fee to fund maintenance.

More than 1,700 women from 96 countries have completed the training. Estimates of households electrified range from about 60,000 (Ministry of New and Renewable Energy) to 75,000 (Barefoot College), reflecting different counting dates. Within India alone, the government reports roughly 26,000 houses electrified across 688 villages in 17 states. The model won a 2003 Ashden Award for sustainable energy.

A 2024 peer-reviewed Nature Energy study of a Barefoot-linked programme in Zanzibar found its community-embedded, women-led design "can disrupt established gender norms and produce better project outcomes" than top-down alternatives, while a separate academic critique found the model both challenges and, in places, reproduces older gender-and-development assumptions. The programme remains dependent on government grants and international donor funding rather than being self-sustaining purely through user fees, though it has continued to operate and expand for over four decades.