Barefoot College Solar Night Schools · India

In 1975, an organization called the Barefoot College which worked with these populations in the Rajasthan desert became aware of the situation children of the region were facing. So it worked with the communities to open night schools that would enable families to actually send their kids to school without having to go without their much needed help for economic activities and household chores.

Unlike regular schools, the Barefoot College night schools have constantly adapted their model to better meet the economic and cultural realities of children to ensure kids can not only attend classes but actually make the most of them, for the benefit of themselves and their communities. To accomplish this, Barefoot college has deployed four main strategies:

1. The school timetable and calendar cater to the children’s needs.
2. The schools are supported by a whole network of development programs that help meet the various needs of students and their families so kids can make the most of the school experience.
3. Schools are organized and run with a great deal of local participation.
4. The curriculum abides by an intercultural education model meant to both expand opportunities for children and also yield benefits to communities.

The first thing night schools do to ensure that children can actually attend classes is that timetables are tailored to their needs: they begin at 6 pm and finish at approximately 10 pm, which allows children to finish helping their families first before going to school. In addition, attendance is flexible at specific periods of the year, such as during planting and harvesting seasons, or when students have to migrate seasonally to areas where animals can graze.

Second, Barefoot College reinforces its work with several of its other development programs in the region to ensure that children can actually go to school and make the most of their education. In this way, schools operate under what is known as an "integrated service delivery model” that meets the different needs of students or their families:

Because there is no electricity grid in these areas, the solar energy program enables communities to make solar lamps themselves so that classes can take place at night (hence the program’s name: Solar Night Schools). And because this is a desert and children must usually spend part of their day collecting water from the well, schools have also installed rainwater harvesting tanks so that children can study and still return home with water without having to choose one activity over the other for lack of time. Besides, teachers are taught to identify possible health concerns in children in a timely manner by the health program. And the carpentry workshop that works with people with disabilities supplies the schools with toys and didactic materials.

This integration of different programs and services into the schools also makes some vocational education possible, which means that children can join one of the different Barefoot College initiatives once they graduate instead of being forced to migrate to find jobs –perhaps as technicians in the solar energy program, for instance, or as teachers in the schools.

The third strategy that Barefoot College has deployed to make schools more relevant to the context and needs of children and their communities is to create different participation mechanisms and dynamics that ensure local stewardship of the project at all stages.

Every couple of years, for instance, students from all night schools cast a vote to elect a Children's Parliament that represents them before the communities and their authorities, voices their concerns and views as direct beneficiaries of the schools, and sometimes also monitors the work of teachers, the availability of drinking water, the functioning of solar lamps, or the arrival of educational materials. In this way, children are taught to be proactive in solving their own problems from a young age, and the schools are guaranteed a constant flow of feedback and assessment.

In addition, there is an Education Committee in every community, which is managed by the communities themselves on a voluntary basis and is responsible for organizing the schools’ tasks, managing the funds they receive from Barefoot College and coordinating community participation. This helps best leverage local contributions in terms of space, work, materials, and so on, and better address any needs that may arise according to the priorities and interests of the communities themselves.

What these Education Committees and the Children’s Parliament help accomplish is decentralizing school management and involving families with the project –thus increasing their confidence in the long-term benefits of the initiative and encouraging them to send their children to school. The annual celebration of the Balmela Festival – which thanks the communities for their contributions and keeps them up to date with the schools' progress– also reinforces this purpose of community involvement.

According to Barefoot College, "literacy" is what is acquired in school, while "education" is what is gained from family, traditions, culture, environment and personal experiences. And both are crucial to individual and communal growth –which is why the night schools have sought a balance between imparting local as well as universal knowledge, between teaching general literacy and providing learning at the family and community level. And this is also the reason why, in addition to attracting kids to school and making it more relevant to them and their communities, night schools seek to help them eventually join or re-enter regular public schools.

To accomplish this, solar night schools abide by an Intercultural Education model in which official curricula are supplemented with local knowledge, resources and skills. This means that schools regularly invite community members to talk to kids about important topics to local life, use local languages, offer vocational education, organize trips to local institutions such as the post office or the police station to see how they work, create their own learning materials, organize festivals and Children's Parliament meetings to keep the community involved, and so on. And, in addition, night schools offer special 10-month courses to prepare children who are ready to join public schools.

Teachers are usually community members themselves who have been trained with an intensive ten-day program that is later reinforced by monthly meetings in which problems are addressed and teaching skills and methods improved. In addition, non-caste or "lower" caste teachers are encouraged to participate so that children and their families respect and recognize them as their equals because of the awareness they gain of their role in their community and their lives.

Barefoot College covers the schools' fixed expenses with donations and grants –water tank set up, or solar lamp manufacturing, for instance. But other expenses –such as teachers' salaries, facility repair, special activities such as children's parliament meetings and training workshops– are paid for with the interests yielded by a capital fund that the organization set up a few years back by investing some donations. Sometimes the interests are not enough to cover these expenses and the organization must either use the fund's capital –putting the survival of the program at risk– or get new funding, which is not easy because resources for educational projects are increasingly difficult to get a hold of, particularly since the 2008 financial crisis. For this reason, Barefoot College is doing everything in its power to diversify its sources of support to be able to sustain its capital fund and to maintain the necessary independence and autonomy that keep the project’s decision making and model relevant to the communities.

In this sense, Barefoot College has had two interesting accomplishments. The first is that by formally integrating its various programs, the organization has been able to leverage the materials, personnel and even financial resources allotted to each program for the benefit of all other programs too (and this is important because some fields attract more support than others). Thus, any contribution to Barefoot College in general also supports the Night Schools in particular. The second is that the organization has managed to cover almost all the needs of the project with voluntary contributions from the communities themselves: more than 5000 honorary members support the work of the organization by providing school facilities, helping to manage them through local Education Committees, teaching the children, and others. This is distinctive because development projects are frequently organized from far away, in headquarters removed from the actual sites and people they are meant for.

The night schools’ long-term impact has been broad: many of the graduates now have children enrolled in the schools themselves, and cycles in which generation after generation reached adulthood without knowing how to read or write are being broken. In addition, many of the students want to become teachers, which broadens their options for their own future and, of course, that of the schools!

The project has been so successful since its launch in 1975 that it has spread to eleven states in the country and has opened more than 225 schools for the benefit of more than 75,000 children who could not otherwise join formal educational programs due to the precarious economic conditions of their families and communities.

In addition, since 1988, Barefoot College has replicated its model in some day schools that run independently but collaborate with the organization to serve children who, for various reasons related to marginalization, have been unable to enroll in other public or private schools. And Barefoot College has also worked with local authorities to implement parts of its model in public schools to attract children who have dropped out of education.