Women and the fight against poverty
Barefoot College is an organization based in Rajasthan, India whose goal is to empower and equip rural illiterate women so that they may drive change and improvement in their families and societies.
Requirement to join Barefoot college is really simple:
- You need to be illiterate
- You need to take your learnings and skills back to your village and invest your time and energy there.
The premise is even simpler:
- Women are more invested in the long term in their neighborhoods, and are willing to put in work to see results much further down the line
- Men on the other hand, when they pick up skills, tend to want to move to better lifestyles which means that they tend to not invest their time and energy in their villages for long periods of time.
We are not being some sort of reverse sexists here. While outliers always exist, both the above statements are corroborated by data gathered from multiple communities in the world.
How does Barefoot achieve this? Watch the trailer of the movie “Solar Mamas”, made by TED prizewinning filmmaker Jehane Noujaim that documents the work and the impact of Barefoot College.
And then go watch the full movie here
– Sujatha