FRED DE SAM LAZARO: The students are mostly women. Some are grandmothers. Hundreds have come through here from villages across India and a dozen other countries to learn how to install and maintain solar energy in rural areas.
Even though it's sophisticated coursework, the only pre-requisite for admission to the Barefoot College is that there are no pre-requisites, not even to speak the language.
Until we arrived with a translator, these Mauritanian women who'd been here four months hadn't spoken to anyone else in Arabic, the only language they know. But language is not a barrier to learning, says the college's founder.
BUNKER ROY (Founder, Barefoot College): Our job is to show how it is possible to take an illiterate woman and make her into an engineer in six months and show that she can solar-electrify a village.
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