By Jaswanth Dadi | Project Coordinator
The Barefoot College Tilonia is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year!
Since its inception, the Barefoot College Tilonia has worked with marginalized, exploited, and impoverished rural poor who live on less than $1 a day to lift them above the poverty line with dignity and respect. The dream was to establish a rural college in India that was built by and exclusively for the poor.
The Barefoot College is a center of learning and unlearning with a difference:
The Barefoot College demystifies technologies and decentralizes their uses by transferring the access, control, management and ownership of sophisticated technologies to rural men and women, who can barely read and write. The College believes that even uneducated poor have the right to use technologies to improve their life and skills.
Rainwater harvesting has been one of the technologies that the College has implemented in partnership with local communities as part of its holistic community-based approach to development.
Why rainwater harvesting?
Barefoot College believes that every drop of fresh water that falls on the ground, especially in developing regions, should be harnessed for use. Rather than wasting water that runs off rooftops and along streets, we combine traditional harvesting practices with new technologies to make water accessible, clean and safe to drink. We do not have to rely on wells and unpredictable groundwater levels to provide potable water to hundreds of thousands of people in need.
Of all the water solutions that the College has tried and tested, rainwater harvesting has been the most sustainable and effective. Rainwater harvesting is a low-cost method with maximum benefits. It provides clean, potable drinking water for villages, irrigates fields and sustains livestock—all important criteria for rural communities that depend on agriculture and animal husbandry for their livelihoods.
Your support helps expand our work in rainwater harvesting to more rural communities in India.
Links:
By Jaswanth Dadi | WASH Projects, Barefoot College Tilonia
By Ellen Fish | Project Leader
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