Best solar engineers are grandmothers.....



Who make the best solar engineers? Men, women or grandmothers?

According to Bunker Roy, the founder of the Barefoot College in India, it's the grandmothers. "One lesson we learned," he told the TED audience on Thursday, "is that men are untrainable. Men are restless, they're ambitious, they're compulsively mobile and they want a certificate."

Roy's great belief is that the poor have all the skills they need to help themselves, and his organisation has had huge success in bringing education and services to the rural poor around the world. The problem with training men, he says, is that they tend to want to leave the villages, and take their skills with them.

His solution has been to train the grandmothers. In Sierra Leone right now, 150 grandmothers are being trained as solar engineers, who will be able to go and electrify theirs and others' villages. In a few months, he says, "they will know more about solar engineering than a graduate after five years."

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