Rafea is a Bedouin woman in Jordan, the second wife in her marriage, with four children and no formal education. She is selected for the Barefoot College in India, a six-month program that trains illiterate, middle-aged women from poor communities around the world to become solar engineers, wiring their villages for electricity when no one else will. The camera follows her struggle with soldering circuits and reading wire diagrams in a language she cannot speak, alongside women from Africa and elsewhere in Asia facing the same barrier. The harder fight happens at home: her husband and family object to her being away for months, and at points threaten her custody of her children if she does not return. Filmmakers Mona Eldaief and Jehane Noujaim stay with Rafea through both fronts of that conflict, in India and back in the desert, without softening the cost of her choice. The film was produced as part of the Why Poverty series, and it treats Rafea's fight for a technical certificate as a stand-in for a much larger argument about what keeps poor women poor.