Barefoot Teacher is a South African communications development
company that assists non-governmental organisations, government departments,
public entities, small businesses and individuals to clearly and effectively
communicate with their markets, clients and stakeholders.
Why Barefoot Teacher?
In the mid-20th century many people in rural China
were dying from preventable causes, due to the lack of trained doctors. Knowing
that millions more would die before enough doctors could be conventionally
trained, the Chinese rapidly trained thousands of young people from rural
villages in obstetrics, first aid and traditional medicine. Every village soon
had a barefoot doctor and mortality dropped rapidly.
The barefoot doctor programme gained the State
the time needed to complete the conventional training of the number of doctors
required to permanently resolve the crisis.
The
programme succeeded, not only because it was
cost-effective, results-focused and creative, but also because it
empowered people by developing their own capacity. The pragmatic
‘barefoot’ approach
has since been applied in many other countries and situations.
Barefoot Teacher applies the ‘barefoot’
principles to produce effective communications in the development sector.
