By David Bornstein
This edition of Changemakers features two social entrepreneurs – Sister Cyril Mooney, based in Calcutta, India, and Krzysztof Liszcz, based in Torun, Poland – who have developed systems to address social problems in the areas of education and disability using the "barefoot professionals" approach.
This approach refers social entrepreneurs' practice of taking skills and information that are normally concentrated in the hands of professionals, and spreading them to groups in the general population. The objective is to carry essential skills to places where they are typically absent – and to do it at a cost that is manageable. Typically, without barefoot professionals, there is no other viable way to address the problem in question at anywhere near the scale needed.
