Roy Sanjit (Bunker)
Organization: Barefoot College
Year Founded: 1972
Country: India
Website: www.barefootcollege.org
Geographic Area of Impact: Afghanistan,Bhutan ,Bolivia,Cameroon,Ethiopia,Gambia,India,Mali,Mauritania,Sierra Leone.
Model: Hybrid Non-Profit
Focus: Education,Energy,Rural Development,Technology,Water.
Schwab Fellow of the World Economic Forum The Innovation Barefoot College identifies poor, rural, jobless and unemployable youth who have been unable to finish their formal education and have returned to their villages as dropouts. These very individuals are trained to be "barefoot" doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, metal workers, IT specialists and communicators. The innovation lies in the simple and informal method of confidence building. Barefoot College does not believe that educational degrees are either relevant or important when it comes to developing people; only a hands-on approach achieves results. The Barefoot method challenges the notion that formal education is required to become a solar engineer, for instance. To date, Barefoot technologists have solar electrified several thousand houses in eight Indian states and installed hand pumps in the Himalayas, a task which urban engineers had declared technically impossible. Barefoot water engineers have planned and implemented piped drinking water in their communities. Barefoot educators have been trained as pre-primary and night schools teachers instructing some 3,000 boys and girls who attend one of the 150 Barefoot-run night schools. The schools have been specially designed to promote leadership amongst students- a Children's Parliament supervises and all three elected prime ministers have been girls. In the local communities where graduates live and work, Barefoot facilitators use puppets and theatre to change attitudes around issues such as child marriage, rights of women, equal wages for women and child literacy. The Barefoot campus itself is a testament to the quality of its training programs: Barefoot-educated architects and masons constructed the 30,000 square foot facility out of low-cost materials. It is the only fully solar electrified College in India. Barefoot College is evidence of the infinite capacity people posses to identify and solve their own problems with their own skills, encouraging self-reliance and private initiative. Background The Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) was created in 1972 by a group of students from top Indian universities under the leadership of Bunker Roy. Inspired by Gandian principles, the social drive of this group first materialized in the creation of Barefoot College in Tilonia, Rajasthan. Barefoot College was built around the concept of the village as a self-reliant unit. By applying informal educational processes to build and repair technologies needed to provide basic needs, the illiterate or semi-literate rural poor can gain control of and manage these technologies without help from outside experts. All members of the Barefoot College receive a living wage, not a market wage, and earn a maximum living wage of US$ 100 a month. Strategy Barefoot College operates in a decentralized and non-hierarchical manner where the inhabitants from the surrounding villages who are part of the College follow the same model: the village has a council where community issues are taken up and decided. On the first week of each month, the democratically elected village council reviews and evaluates all work carried out the previous month and organizes the agenda for the weeks ahead. Collective, transparent and accountable decisions are at the core of governance. Whether starting a night school or constructing a rainwater harvesting structure, for example, costs are publicized for all to review, allowing villagers to assess the value of their work. The Entrepreneur Bunker Roy has been a leading figure in the Indian NGO community for the past thirty years. He is a source of inspiration for many younger social entrepreneurs. The code of conduct debate he launched 10 years ago was then a groundbreaking, controversial, but visionary initiative. It sought to promote the standardization of social auditing to render the Indian voluntary social sector more transparent, effective, reliable and accountable. The Barefoot College is the only community-based organization in India that has publicized and opened its auditing books for the past ten years. Roy's initiative was cut short as the social sector divided around the lines of pro- and anti-transparency advocates. However, the campaign was successful in influencing government policy and a Credibility Alliance is being developed today to readdress the transparency issue raised by Bunker a decade ago.
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