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Bunker Roy    

Founder of Barefoot College

Development projects the world over run into one crucial point: For a project to live on, it needs to be organic, owned and sustained by those it serves. In 1972,  Sanjit “Bunker” Roy founded the Barefoot College, in the village of Tilonia in Rajasthan, India, with just this mission: to provide basic services and solutions in rural communities with the objective of making them self-sufficient. These “barefoot solutions” can be broadly categorized into solar energy, water, education, health care, rural handicrafts, people’s action, communication, women’s empowerment and wasteland development. The Barefoot College education program, for instance, teaches literacy and also skills, encouraging learning-by-doing. (Literacy is only part of it.)  Bunker’s organization has also successfully trained grandmothers from Africa and the Himalayan region to be solar engineers so they can bring electricity to their remote villages.

As he says, Barefoot College is "a place of learning and unlearning: where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher."

News


Bunker Roy: Want inclusive growth? Look at rural poor | ABS-CBN ...
Bunker Roy, Founder of the social work and research center Barefoot College said the APEC economic leaders should strongly consider shifting their focus.
Bunker Roy Changed the Face of Tilonia by Teaching It to Be Self ...
A vocational training college in Rajasthan, started by well known educator and activist Sanjit Bunker Roy, is responsible for lighting up the homes of thousands ...
Bunker Roy and his life-changing idea - Conversations - ABC Radio
Turning his back on a life of privilege, Bunker Roy set up a college to help those struggling with poverty.

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