The Women Barefoot Solar Engineers of Africa work to improve the lives of the rural poor living in remote
villages off the energy grids. These women, many of them grandmothers and most of them illiterate, work in the 21 least developed countries in Africa, helping to supply their communities with clean, low-cost household lighting from solar energy. Since 2005, over 140 women from Africa have trained at the Barefoot College in India. Within six months, these women learned how to fabricate, install, and maintain solar-powered household lighting systems and were capable of transforming the lives of over 2,000 families in solar-electrified villages in Africa.