Barefoot College in India trains Street By 50 Headphones women to be solar engineersWomen from across the globe train for six months to then educate their home villagesWomen chosen to be trained as men seen to be "restless", says college founder
Roy is the social entrepreneur Sms Audio 50 Cent and founder of the Barefoot College and has been championing a bottom-up approach to education and empowering rural poor since 1972.
It is now a global enterprise with roots in India. Roy recruits women from around the world to install and maintain solar lighting and power in their home villages.
"If you ask any solar engineer in the world, 'Can anyone make this in a village?' they say it's technically impossible. And if I say a grandmother is making it who is illiterate, he can't believe it, it's beyond his comprehension," says Roy.
The United Nations estimates that around 1.5 billion people still live without electricity, and often the best and most immediate way to bring non-polluting electricity to remote regions is with solar energy.
Roy certainly believes so.
"The way to go about this is not a centralized grid system, which brings in power from hundreds of miles away," he says.
"It is to bring in basic light right down to the level of basic household wherein they take ownership and control over that technology."
Women are the focus for the solar power projects that the Barefoot College runs because men "were very untrainable," says Roy.
"(Men) were restless, compulsively mobile, and they all want a certificate and the moment you give them a certificate they leave the village and go to the cities looking for jobs.
"So why not invest in women, older women, mature women, gutsy women who have roots Sms Audio 50 Cent in the village and train them."
Coming from countries across the world, the women are trained for six months before returning home. Many of the women have previously never left their villages before.
"We were scared. The women learn to build and maintain a variety of solar-powered lamps and chargers.
The Barefoot College "campus" in Tilonia, Rajasthan, is a testament to the power of solar --everything there is powered by the sun; food is prepared using a parabolic solar cooker, night classes are powered by solar lanterns.
Roy says that the school has trained 150 grandmothers from 28 countries, electrified around 10,000 houses with solar power and saved several thousands of liters of diesel and kerosene from polluting the atmosphere.
