A program to train rural Guatemalan women, run from Miami
By J.P. Faber
The idea of Barefoot College International (BCI) is as straightforward as it is profoundly effective: train women from rural areas with the skills they need to improve their lives and the standard of living in their communities, then send them home with their newly acquired knowledge. In the case of Guatemala, the most recent program in the Americas, the women are trained to install mini solar power grids.
“We work for women,” says Aura Reinhardt, who directs the Central and South American programs for BCI from Miami. “We want to make sure that women, particularly those that are left behind, have an opportunity to improve their livelihoods – and then, obviously, the living standards of their families.”
In Guatemala, Barefoot works with Indigenous women from what’s known as the Northwestern Highlands, in Mayan villages that are literally in the middle of nowhere. Here, the indigenous people of Guatemala, who faced what amounted to a genocidal campaign for decades, fled to distant mountainsides and rainforests. As with their other projects in Latin America, India, and Africa, Barefoot goes into the rural areas and partners with a regional NGO, which supplies the local knowledge and guides them to remote villages. “We have done a lot of work in Guatemala,” says Reinhardt. “We go into the villages and invite the community to send two or three women to our training camp.”
In Guatemala, the native women then spend three months learning how to assemble solar panels, a solar grid, and solar lanterns. “It is a six-month situation because these women don’t read or write… It’s a major commitment for the chieftain or head of the village to assign a woman or two to go away for six months for training. Sometimes they are grandmothers, sometimes they are mothers, and sometimes they are just young enough that they haven’t had children yet,” says Reinhardt.
When the women return to their villages, they oversee delivery of the equipment that allows them to illuminate houses and huts. Suddenly, the villagers are not living just by candlelight or kerosene lantern. “At night, they can actually flip a switch and a light
goes on. Now, children can study at night. It’s really an interesting proposition,” says Reinhardt. And the women don’t just learn how to assemble a solar panel. “They learn how to solder the wires, they learn how to repair, they learn how to put something together from scratch, because once the equipment is there, and they’ve installed it, they become the trainer of the next group, and they become the repair [person],” says Reinhardt.
The base camp in Guatemala, about an eight-hour drive from Guatemala City, was just opened in 2022, and has been so successful that it’s now preparing to serve as the training center for women from other Central American countries. At any given time, 30 to 40 women will be taking instruction there.
“We call the people who get the training ‘Solar Mamas’ because, no matter what country they are from – from Africa, or from the Middle East, wherever we are training them – they are always women. And the reason for that is because women are much more responsible than men,” says Reinhardt. After training, she says, women go back to their villages and actually do what they were sent to do – in Guatemala, installing lights in scores of village shacks, and teaching others how to maintain the system. Men, on the other hand, typically use their training to go off and get a job somewhere else. “They don’t go back to their villages,” she says.
The solar training in Guatemala is just the latest effort by Barefoot College International to lift rural communities out of poverty. The organization, initially called the Social Work and Research Centre, was launched in 1972 by Sanjit “Bunker” Roy, an Indian national who was then a university student in the U.S. Naturally enough, its first programs were set up in India, with the mission to bring water and irrigation to rural communities. That objective soon changed to empowerment and sustainability; in 2010, Roy was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
“It was all about how they build their houses, how they grow their vegetables, or how they take care of their livestock, and then to bring them up to a level where they can be sustainable. So, it’s really all about sustainability,” says Reinhardt, who joined the organization 12 years ago and is now the Chair of Board in the U.S. “One of the objectives I had when [I joined] was to focus on Central and South America. So much attention was being given – and for good reason – to Africa, India, parts of Asia, and so on. But I said, ‘We’re over here now. We need to be doing this for all the indigenous people in all the countries in Central and South America who are off the grid.’”
The first Latin American ‘students’ were brought from deep in the Amazon, three women for whom it took eight days to get to a training camp in India, traveling by canoe and then tiny jungle airports. That was before the center was set up in Guatemala, on the grounds of an old coffee plantation. “It took a long time to get it because we were dealing with the government,” says Reinhardt. But last December, the president of Guatemala gave the organization an award for what they were accomplishing.
Funding for nonprofit Barefoot College International comes from grants, many from corporations, including a recent one from Gap. Another came from Puma Energy, an energy company based in Switzerland, and Starbucks funded a Barefoot tea-growing project in India. They are also supported by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). The organization is based in Geneva, with offices in London and Delhi, India. In Zanzibar, they are teaching women how to be beekeepers and sell honey to hotels. In East Africa, the instruction is about sanitation, with night school for cattle herders.
“Our latest program is to teach women how to fly drones over the countryside to evaluate the quality of the soil and the vegetation,” says Reinhardt, a project funded by the World Food Programme.
“The work we do in 93 countries allows women to transform their lives and the lives of their loved ones for the better,” says Sue Stevenson, head of strategic partnerships and international development for Barefoot College International. “Our programs are unique in that they focus on self-sufficiency first, and therefore they equip women with the tools and the knowledge they need to both access and leverage clean energy – real educational and vocational growth for a better future than they ever thought possible.”
