Apart from those in the medical profession, there can't be many men in the world who saw as many babies being born this year as I did. I wanted to start at the beginning -- at the birth of a child -- to see how poverty might impact on the life of an infant. Making this film vividly brought home the fact that we shouldn't accept poverty as an inescapable and fixed fact of life.

When we started filming Solar Mamas, there were 28 women from seven different countries who spoke nine different languages all sitting together in a classroom at the Barefoot College. At first, six months of technical training in a classroom seemed like a very slow process. But one month into the training, the drama began.