Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement
Bunker Roy: Instruiĝi per nudpiedula movado
Sanjit “Bunker” Roy is the founder of Barefoot College, which helps rural communities becomes self-sufficient. Full bio
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bunker Roy - EducatorSanjit “Bunker” Roy is the founder of Barefoot College, which helps rural communities becomes self-sufficient.
Why you should listen
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."
Bunker Roy | Speaker | TED.com