Engineering // Current TV

Lightining the rural areas of Pakistan with indigenous hydro solution - Mera Passion Pakistan

Buner (Pakistan): Who says you need to be an electrical engineer to light up the... more

mppakistan3
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8 days ago
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Can we be a little more careful how we abuse the word “science”? Thank you. | Scholars and Rogues

Every once in awhile we will, for a variety of reasons, pick out a word that has... more

hoosierdaddy
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20 days ago
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Robot Music: James Bond Theme

That $50,000 tuition practically pays for itself.

mybologna
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1 month ago
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California Community College Budget Cut Documentary Premieres Online

Community colleges are in dire straights in California after losing large support from... more

Act2action
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2 months ago
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Another Reason Vocational Training is Important

Real people benefit from state and federally-funded vocational training programs, then... more

Progresshiv
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5 months ago
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4 comments

Syria - Bloody travel of first American 'democratic' experiment from 1947 - 2011

What is happening in Syria feels like one of the last gasps of the age of the military... more

worrg
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6 months ago
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The American Jobs Program: The Fix We’re In For: The State of Our Bridges

This interactive map allows you to map all the deficient bridges within 10 miles of... more

jasonshurb
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8 months ago
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4 comments

“9-11, 10 years later, What Really Happened?”

http://rtruth.blog.com/9-11-10-years-later-what-really-happened/

mab001
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9 months ago
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13 comments

The Daily Blender: One Man Solves How People Built Stonehenge (VIDEO)

The forgotten technology. Mr. Wally Wallington, the man from Flint, Michigan is... more

dryeraser
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11 months ago
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Auto mechanics training program edging Kenyan women into "male" occupations

Charles Sikulu, public relations officer for the University of Nairobi, Kenya's... more

Womens_eNews
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12 months ago
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Student-designed device to fight battlefield hypothermia

For U.S. troops, the most common type of battlefield fatality involves blood loss due... more

suzane
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1 year ago
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Euthanasia Coaster - with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being

“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a... more

worrg
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1 year ago
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Can America still pick winners in the energy innovation race?

An opportunity to watch Steve Chu, US Energy Secretary, running us through a list of... more

littlemissdebbie
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1 year ago
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2 comments

NATO warned against strikes on Libya's Great Manmade River Project

NATO-led air strikes on Libya could trigger a human and environmental disaster if they... more

JanforGore
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1 year ago
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23 comments

AutoCad WS is on android

Engineer's best friend AutoCad WS is now available on android. AutoCad WS mobile... more

karthikmns
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1 year ago
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Article: UC Berkeley Launches Synthetic Biology Institute To Advance Research In Biological Engineering

the jerks at Berkeley are going to save the world... ""an industrial... more

frankpatton
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1 year ago
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Photo gallery - Accident repair Fukushima Tepco Photos

Have a look at the internal photos from one of the worst companies worldwide - liars... more

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1 year ago
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How Barefoot College is empowering women through peer to peer learning and technology

Sanjit "Bunker" Roy has found a better way to solve poverty: train women as engineers so they can transform their villages.

Early one morning in March 2010, Susanna Adelheid Huis left her home in the village of Uis Tsaurob in the central plateau of Namibia. Her family scratches a living as smallholders, here on the one per cent of her homeland that is forgiving enough to support subsistence agriculture. She took a last look at her house -- one of 12 in the settlement -- and thought of her husband, five children (the youngest of whom was four) and two grandchildren whom she wouldn't see for six months. She would miss the coming cool months, returning in September when it was beginning to get hot and dust would be thick in the air.

As Huis neared the capital, Windhoek, 300km away, she was already missing her family. But she was excited too: "It was the first time I ever flew," the 49-year-old with a ready smile later recalls. Her trip would take her through another three airports -- Johannesburg, Delhi and Jaipur. She was embarking on an adventure she hadn't been entirely convinced about when the idea had been put to her several months before by a tall, distinguished-looking Indian man who had shown up in Uis Tsaurob one day. He had travelled 8,000km with a proposal for the local people: would they like to send some women from the village to his college in India to study for six months? But why, they had asked, should they travel so far? What would they learn there?

The man replied that he would like to teach them to be engineers. The villagers talked among themselves and eventually decided that they would send three women.

One of them was Huis. The tall Indian man was Sanjit "Bunker" Roy, a social activist, educator and the founder of Barefoot College, an organisation based in Tilonia -- a small village two hours' drive west of Jaipur through the arid farmland of Rajasthan -- that aims to help the estimated 41 per cent of the Indian population who live below the international poverty line. Roy's model -- educating local people through peer-to-peer learning -- is transformational in that it relies on the passing on of traditional skills and knowledge rather than an emphasis on outside educators bringing new ideas and influences. Local people are trained as doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers, mechanics, communicators and accountants and they use simple technology in innovative and disruptive ways: mobile phones are set to work monitoring water quality through an online dataset, solar-powered cookers are constructed to break dependence on wood or costly kerosene. Some lessons at the college are recorded and uploaded to the internet. There is no hierarchy: everyone eats sitting on the floor and no one receives a salary of more than $150 per month. Importantly, there is financial transparency. Staff bank accounts are published, as are company finances.

"The model has taken into account the pace at which people think, the culture, which is respected, and the capacity -- the infinite capacity -- of the community to adjust to, apply and to disseminate ideas," says Roy, 65, in a calm baritone as he sits cross-legged on a rug beneath a rotating fan in his simple office on the Barefoot campus. He wears a loose red shirt, or kurta, with white pyjama bottoms. His glasses hang from a chain around his neck. "That's what scalability is all about. It's a model that people understand, it's not complicated. It respects the skills that people have rather than discarding them or replacing them."

Roy has disrupted the model that many NGOs and well-endowed foundations promote in the developing world, namely a top-down approach led by outside, often governmental, institutions. Critics argue that this methodology doesn't offer long-term sustainable growth and isn't scalable. Roy is among them.

"You have a graveyard of successful failures everywhere in the world with this top-down solution that has not worked. With foreign expertise... they don't know the culture and they don't know what's happening in the countries." His voice intensifies. "There is a growing anger We have to look for alternatives. It has to be bottom-up, it has to be indigenous, it has to develop solutions from the ground up, and it has to be both community based and community managed."

There are now 24 colleges inspired by the Barefoot model in India. Since 2004, Roy has brought women from 15 African nations as well as Bhutan, Afghanistan and Bolivia to train at the camp as solar engineers. He hopes soon to bring women from Palestine. The college says it has trained 15,000 women in skills including solar engineering, healthcare, water testing and social activism, and that as a result, around 500,000 people have been provided with basic services such as healthcare, drinking water and education. On the Barefoot campus you can meet women who, only six months earlier, were day labourers and are now practising dentistry, women who formed a collective to manufacture solar ovens, illiterate farmers now overseeing engineering projects, and girls who attend Barefoot night school because they work in the fields during the day when state schools are open. Roy estimates that, in India, the Barefoot solar-electrification programme saves two million litres of kerosene every year.

contSanjit "Bunker" Roy has found a better way to solve poverty: train women as... more

JanforGore
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1 year ago
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5 comments

Engineering for Teens and Tweens at Design Squad Nation

The goal of the website is to give kids a stronger understanding of the design... more

jwag57
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1 year ago
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20 Coolest TED Talks for Engineers

With new technology and innovation rapidly changing how we live our lives, practice... more

GoldenHeart
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1 year ago
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