GREEN SPACE
Chit Juan
What can you let grandmothers do besides take care of your kids while you work? Well, they can be “engineers”—solar engineers to be exact. Bunker Roy and his Barefoot College in India now have grandmothers aged 35 to 50 years old, learning how to make solar lamps, repair them and break them down and build them again.
I had the fortune of meeting Bunker Roy when he spoke at the Women’s Economic Empowerment Conference hosted by United Nations (UN) Women and Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) in Ottawa, Canada.
The Barefoot College has a nontraditional way of empowering women who are illiterate and have been homebound most of their life. In fact the requirements to get free training are: You must be illiterate, be between 35 to 50 years old, and you must never have left your town all your life. These are the women who become most successful as trained solar engineers, per Barefoot College’s experience.
What does it take? When you have found your grandmothers who may qualify, Bunker Roy will ask you to write an application and the Government of India will send you the airfare and you will get training for six months in India, sponsored by the government of India. The medium of instruction is sign language. There is no need for translators or interpreters. But it works. And it has worked so much that many countries in Africa have already benefited from these scholarships.
When the grandmothers return to their hometowns, they are sent the lamp kits which they then assemble, much to the amazement of their co-villagers and especially to the surprise of their families. The grandmothers are also around to repair or fix any lamp that does not work properly. This is a big change from our project where we bought solar lamps cum cell phone chargers and most of the units are now broken. Whether India or China-made, the lamps do not last very long. At least from our experience, communities use them for a year or two, derive income from using them as cell phone chargers, but sadly they have a short economic life.
In remote villages in India, Africa and some parts of the Philippines many towns have no electricity as they are off grid and most of them use kerosene, which is not only expensive but is dangerous to use. For cell phone charging, many have to walk 2 to 5 kilometers to town every week, to charge their cell phones.
So, with solar lamps that double up as chargers, remote villages can now have light and have income as well from cell phone charging. Children are able to study at night and homes are spared from the dangers of fire due to kerosene leaks from gas lamps.
Empowering women can take many forms. It can be through economic empowerment by giving them small businesses to start with or even better, it can be empowering them with a skill that will change their lives and change the lives of people around them as well.
Further, the criteria of Bunker Roy’s model to recruit illiterate grandmothers have worked so well because of
sociological reasons. Grandmothers, especially if they have not had an education, pretty much resign themselves to a life of simply caring for their children’s children, often without pay except food and shelter.
They are 35 to 50 years old because they marry young and their daughters usually will also have offspring who will marry young as well.
I spoke with Bunker Roy to bring this program to the Philippines. While he has worked with African grandmothers for the past few years, he has never been to the Philippines and has not started the program in Southeast Asia. We may be his first model for this part of the world.
I wonder if we have grandmothers who are illiterate, given that our literacy rate is over 90 percent. Or maybe we can start in our remotest communities where cultural minorities live. Whoever qualifies, I think this model of a social enterprise is not only sustainable but has an impact that not only lights up our villages but more than that. It lights up the spirits of many women, many of whom have resigned their lives to being homebound and being almost useless save for performing domestic chores and rearing their children’s children.
It would be a welcome change to empower lolas and see how they can turn their lives around.
Chit Juan is a founder and owner of ECHOStore sustainable lifestyle in Serendra and Podium malls. She also heads the Women’s Business Council of the Philippines and the Philippine Coffee Board Inc., two non-profits close to her heart. She often speaks to corporates, youth and NGOs on social entrepreneurship, women empowerment, and coffee. You can follow her on twitter.com/chitjuan or find her on facebook:Pacita “Chit” Juan. E-mail her at
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