Barefoot International Digital Inclusion

Barefoot’s solution tackles poverty in education and resources in rural communities that lack access to traditional classroom learning or grid electricity solutions for digital needs. We train rurally poor women as solar engineers, digital educators, and entrepreneurs using literacy optional teaching. These women solar electrify their communities, and set up digital services to charge mobile phones, access wireless internet, and make use of online banking facilities, news services, and educational and vocational training information. This solution transforms the ability of communities to have the time and educational resources using clean energy to improve their access to employment and earning power, and allows them to maintain and control their own digital development through local female solar engineers. If scaled, this solution has the potential to solve logistical and financial barriers to digital access for the most marginalized rural communities around the world, and dramatically improve their long-term quality of life.

Digital access is a serious problem in many remote and rural regions of the world. Figures from the World Bank and WEF estimate that 4 billion people are still offline, which places them in an increasingly unequal position relative to those who have access to online educational and vocational resources, for communications, and to make use of resources such as online banking, online sales and marketplaces, and the increase in potential wealth and long-term stable quality of life that comes with these things. The greatest barrier to rurally poor communities in achieving digital access is stable electricity; the second, almost as significant barrier to digital access for these communities is knowledge in how to build and leverage digital tools and resources once electrification has been achieved. We view these barriers as symbiotic problems that need to be solved together in order to give communities digital access and ensure that they have agency over how they use it to further their development; for this reason we train rurally poor women and community members as solar engineers, help them electrify their communities, and educate them in how to build and use a variety of digital tools, from internet banking to digital classrooms. 

We partner with rurally poor, digitally under-served communities and they select women by consensus to train with us. We train these women over the course of 5 months as solar engineers, capable of building and repairing full solar electrification systems for entire communities. We further train them in digital and financial literacy, health and reproductive health, civil and human rights, and microenterprise creation, and supply them with technology necessary to set up basic internet connections, and to access international communications networks, as well as use tools such as remote online learning through tablets and mobile phones. We use literacy optional teaching methods that can be replicated across literacy and language barriers in order to maximize fast skill acquisition leading to digital functionality. Once these trained women return home and solar electrify communities along with setting up basic digital resources, we support them in the creation of profitable small businesses leveraging stable electricity and digital access; we also support them in enacting digital educational and vocational training programs to continue growth and uplift in economic terms provided by digital access using renewable solar power.

The target population we work with are exclusively rurally poor and remote communities that are underserved by digital access and by any traditional grid electricity and energy solutions. We work especially with women in these communities. Women in rurally poor locales that lack digital access are frequently illiterate or semi-literate, and are taught that they have no role in society other than as a passive manager of a household. This creates both a serious social problem through gender inequality and a lack of financially earning adults, the latter being especially punishing to communities that lack electrical access and easy clean water sources in addition to having no digital access. Side-lining women means that half the adult workforce is side-lined, which compounds the economic inequality that digitally cut-off rurally poor communities suffer from in comparison to more urbanized regions. Our solution trains women first as they are an untapped resource of potential and energy in these communities, and because providing women with skills immediately leads to greater economic health across the board, as well as more positive social attitudes to women by virtue of their very literal ability to materially improve quality of life for their communities.

Additionally, due to the fact that remote, rurally poor communities in many countries are drastically under-served by digital access as well as electrical solutions, people and especially women in these communities lack the skills to leverage digital access even it is somehow acquired; this means that it is exceedingly difficult for people in this position to navigate digital tools such as online bank account and marketplaces with confidence and effectiveness.

To address population needs with our solution, we focus on not just providing digital access through the supply of technology and the renewable energy needed to consistently power it, but through teaching skills that make communities, and especially women, self-sufficient, and able to take charge of their development through digital tools. For example, women who we train as solar engineers are also trained in digital and financial literacy, and how to leverage consistent access to electricity into a more profitable way of life through founding and growing small businesses, as well as educating others. This is key to the success of our solution in two ways. The first is that it creates agency for women, and for digitally left-out communities, by giving them knowledge and the tools to use it with skill and confidence to improve their lives in a very practical way. The second is that it ensures that women being trained and communities being electrified and gaining digital access are engaged in the development of the solution from the first day of their partnership with Barefoot; they have a literal say in what they want out of a digital access solution, and they are able to work with Barefoot to ensure that the program meets their needs in literal terms.

Some successful examples of how this works can be found in our programs in Guatemala, where we have worked with coffee farming communities to electrify them, give them digital communications access, and most recently to set up supply chains between the extremely remote Ixil region and major metropolitan supermarkets for coffee sales using solar-based connectivity. We have also found that multiple communities that we work with – we have programs currently in over 90 countries – also suffer from serious climate change effects, such as our partner communities in the Amazon basin, and in Eastern and Western Africa and in the Pacific Islands. We have found that a key part of meeting community needs with a digital solution is providing them with a long-term sustainable basis for access that reduces climate-change related health issues, which, like the aforementioned gender inequality problem, can dramatically reduce the number of adults in a community able to earn money and provide for their children, which in turn allows them to attend school rather than working; additionally, this also frees up time for healthy adults to benefit from educational and vocational training based on digital access.

Our solution is aligned to the goal of providing underserved rural communities with digital solutions to education, and as a vehicle for significant economic uplift through access to banking tools, small business ecosystems, and vocational training resources that lead to stable employment. The communities we serve have no realistic solution to their increasing lack of digital resources from traditional technologies and methods; we take an innovative approach that focuses on real, practical improvements to quality of life as a direct result of digital access that is long-term sustainable and growable.

We have stable programs in over 90 countries worldwide, and are in a position where we need to imminently grow our work to regional levels to continue helping beneficiaries. We also have a solid basis in terms of partners, ground partners, and international networks to do this efficiently. We are further seeking funding to streamline our work so that programs which are already somewhat scalable globally can become extremely easy to transplant to new (especially new geographically remote and challenging) regions. Our digital solution especially is in a phase of growth, where we have several extremely successful programs that we are seeking to spread to other regions, such as our fully functional rural digital school programs in India.

Our solution is both innovative and catalytic. It is innovate in its treatment of digital access as being symbiotic with the solution of providing reliable, clean electricity access, and with the detailed training of practical digital skills and entrepreneurship and education leveraging digital access. These problems are traditionally treated as either separate, or as different phases of development that must be addressed in a linear order. Our solution takes them as symbiotic problems that can and should be solved together. We also use an innovative approach to skills-first literacy-later teaching, which enables especially women that we train to make swift skills-gains and in turn swift improvements to their quality of life and that of those around them.

  Our solution is catalytic in its ability to transform rural economies and marketplaces through changing the scale on which fast electrification and fast digital access can happen. Putting the tools and knowledge for solar electrification as the basis for digital access into the hands of communities themselves means that communities become able, radically quickly, to use bank accounts; access online marketplaces; use global communications, education and training networks; and accrue broader positive impacts from knowledge resources that would previously have been completely out of their reach.

We currently serve approximately 2.2 million beneficiaries. This number includes only beneficiairies that we can state have had meaningful contact with our solution and benefited from it as a result; if we were to add indirect beneficiaries, this number would be extremely hard to calculate and, we estimate, significantly larger. We are seeking to double this direct beneficiary number over the next 5 years; we see this as a realistic target, given both the current progress and level of success of our solution, but also based on the fact that the current global situation, especially as pertains to COVID-19 and to the effects of climate change, means that remote digital connectivity is becoming more and more important to the educational and economic health and potential for growth of all communities, but especially of remote and rural areas that are poor and lack access to this growing digital ecosystem. 

Our measure of progress is based on our cloud-based Monitoring and Evaluation system, which takes into account a mixture of qualitative and quantitative KPIs at baseline, and at checkpoints throughout the progression of any of our programs.

Our most important measurements are numbers of women trained; number of homes electrified; numbers of children and adults with digital access; numbers of children and adults with workable digital skills; numbers of children and adults with access to educational and vocational training; economic growth resulting from digital access and resources. We take into account social and economic measurements that are associated with 15 of the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, all except Goals 14 and 16. The level to which goals need to be met varies for different communities in very different ecological regions where we work; for example, in Guatemala we are heavily concerned with stopping climate change, ending hunger and ending poverty in the Ixil region; in Tanzania we are more intensely focused on infrastructure creation and stable growth of employment in some of our more advanced programs; in Indonesia we are heavily focused on sustainable communities and responsible consumption and production. All our programs are heavily focused on providing stable clean energy, clean water and sanitation, gender equality, and reduced inequalities through digital access. 

We have 167 full time staff and 20 volunteers. 

On developing and growing this initiative we have 24 key staff.

Our team is composed of what you can think of as members of Barefoot who come from outside of rurally poor and remote communities, and of members who come from these communities, were originally trained by Barefoot College International, and have now joined the organization as Regional Coordinators, and as Master Trainers who train women in solar engineering, digital literacy and access setup, and entrepreneurship. We work with a strict vertical integration format which means that any member of a program, from grassroots up to the executive level, has clear and transparent access to decision making processes and can make their voice heard if they feel they need to. The involvement of grassroots community members in the training of female solar engineers, the planning of organizational policy, and the content of digital curriculums and educational programs is key to our ability to meaningfully address the needs of those we serve. This involvement allows us to understand and respect both their traditions and their day to day needs, and to genuinely address those needs through the intervention of members of the communities with which we work.

Our organization is deeply committed to – and was in fact founded based on – the values of diversity and inclusion. Whilst we are primarily concerned with gender equality and minority populations, we are globally focused on the importance of ensuring that no community, no matter how small and remote, is left behind. Due to out literacy-optional teaching methods, we are able to accommodate all types of learners into our programs, and to ensure that all people, irrespective of gender, cultural and social background, and level of education, can benefit from practical and useful digital access. The reason we work with underserved communities in remote locations is because we feel that these areas of the world are host to the people most marginalized by modern society, and most in need of being given the tools and knowledge to take charge of their own development with dignity. Our pursuit of diversity, inclusion and equity is embedded in every level of our programs, and we ensure that at every stage of organizational development we are guided by the principles of gender equality and equity for all. 

We are applying to solve because our current scaling needs and our desire to streamline and make more effective our operations across the board to meet needs require us to access an entrepreneurial ecosystem that will help us do this in the best and most generative way possible. We are motivated by funding opportunities, but we are applying to solve primarily because of the attraction of having access to mentorship, and to what we view as an incubator of innovative, impact-oriented organizations and people. We feel that Solve would be massively helpful in assisting us in overcoming logistical barriers in terms of streamlining our operations and incorporating even more innovative approaches to our solution into our work, but also in helping us navigate the global funding ecosystem in order to be more sustainably effective in our pursuit of funding for our scaling needs. 

We are primarily interested in guidance from Solve on our strategy development, product distribution and data analysis. We are seeking guidance in these areas as we feel they are the most effective areas to address in order to continue streamlining our operations and improving our ability to pursue stable funding opportunities. We are also seeking as a part of streamlining our operations to enact a global database for our partner communities over the next five years; this means that we need to improve our understanding of and access to large-scale database technologies and methods for use. As part of this process, we are further seeking guidance in expanding our client base, improving and streamlining our business model, and enhancing our ability to pursue funding effectively. 

MIT, engage with student volunteers and R&D

Potentially would be interested in connections to several Solve Members, Foundations and corporations.

Our solution provides digital access and meaningful digital skills learning based on renewable energy - which we also provide the infrastructure for - to the most marginalized and left behind communities on earth. We provide solar engineer training and digital access skills to rurally poor women, who then return home, solar electrify their villages, and provide digital access to communities that have never before had the opportunity for digital equity with more urbanised and wealthy regions. Our solution is focused exclusively on those communities that are left behind and marginalized around the world, because we believe that digital equity is the path to success and stable digital development for those living in the most disadvantaged circumstances imaginable.

Barefoots' solution is specifically designed to improve the lives of women and girls through training them as solar engineers, digital teachers, and small business entrepreneurs who leverage solar energy and digital connectivity into a higher quality of life. Our solution elevates them economically and socially, and materially alters their circumstances in communities by giving them the status of valid knowledge resources. Our solution gives women the opportunity to pursue their aspirations and fulfil there potential with dignity through technological skills, and we work exclusively with rurally poor and remote communities where this is simply not an opportunity women ever normally receive.