How Morocco’s nonprofits are empowering young girls

Many of Morocco’s most marginalised girls have modest ambitions and limited resources. Even just getting through secondary school can be difficult with financial and family pressures. That’s why the help nonprofits offer can be transformative. The most empowering organisations strive to provide more than just the bare necessities. They succeed by ensuring communities are heard and not just helped. However, their journeys are without their challenges.

Goals and Impact

Two nonprofits, in particular, have attracted notice. Both work in remote Moroccan communities.

Education For All might sound self-explanatory, but that education has layers to it. The organisation supports their girls by giving them access to education while promoting an environment more enriching than your average classroom. The organisation also offers lodging, wide-ranging activities, and a tight-knit support network.

EFA focuses on girls ages 12-18 living in rural villages of the High Atlas Mountains. These years are formative ones in any girl’s life but even more so when cultural expectations hang in the air.

“It can be quite typical in these rather traditional villages for girls to drop out of school once they reach puberty and they’ll be more focused on them needing to be married and have children,” Sonia Omar says.

She has been with EFA for 9 of its 15 years and was recently appointed CEO.

EFA now has around 250 girls in 6 houses, a big leap from their initial 10 girls and single rented building.

“We feed them three free wonderful meals a day and they have everything they need…. We have computer rooms and libraries and just the whole thriving environment that exists at our houses boosts the girls’ confidence so that they can go on to do great things,” Omar says.

Omar credits the organisation’s growth to the family’s hard work but also its strong roots.

“The idea of lodging that feels very secure and homely for the girls was very important for us because we needed the agreement of the families for the girls to come to our boarding houses,” she says.

Omar explains that they knew boarding houses were necessary because the girls lived far from the local towns where the schools were located.

“So we’ve been building and running boarding houses near the local schools and the girls have a very quick access,” she adds.

Many nonprofits are often accused of intruding on communities they are not part of. EFA avoided this from the start by acknowledging societal contexts.

“The sense of community was very at heart; we wanted the local communities to feel that we were not invading on culture but rather enhancing and giving opportunity and financial support that they were unable to give,” she says.

The organisation’s work also contributes to the crucial efforts to decrease the rate of child marriage in Morocco.

According to a UNICEF report, “Between 2006 and 2018, approximately 32,000 requests for marriage to children were submitted each year, 85 per cent of which were approved.”

“[Families] know the girl is being financially taken care of through the organization through being able to live in the houses for free so there’s less pressure perhaps to ensure the girl does not fall into early marriage trap,” she says.

Apart from the support of parents, Omar notes that the girls realise education opens them up to more independence.

Confidence and empowerment also define the girls at Project Soar. Ibtissam Bousbibit is a Special Programs Coordinator at Project Soar.

“Soar Girls are the most marginalised in Morocco – living on less than $1 a day. They live in underserved communities where conservative customs create barriers to girls’ empowerment. They often lack support, education opportunities, and access to healthcare, and have parents with limited to no education,” Bousbibit says.

Project Soar started in 2015, and has expanded to different regions over the years.

“So far, Project Soar has allowed a total of 3,034 girls to go through the programme, providing 151,847 hours of empowerment across 55 sites in Morocco, 5 sites in Uganda and 5 in Syria,” Bousbibit explains.

“We empower Soar Girls to embody leadership skills as they progress in the curriculum. For example, in the Voice module, girls learn public speaking and debate skills,” she adds.

The girls are also given a safe space to practice and lead community activities through ways such as “environmental stewardship, organising sports events or advocating for girls’ rights issues.”

Project Soar recognises that though the girls’ development might be internal, they are affected by external factors. The organisation is taking action by directly tackling these challenges.

The new movement, Building a Greater Girls’ Rights (BIGGER Movement) is how Project Soar aims to “mobilise and advocate for change at the national level for teen girls’ rights on issues such as sexual harassment, forced dropping out of school, and crucially, forced early marriage, which is perpetuated by loopholes in the existing legal framework.”

The result was decreased funding from the affected existing donors and the lack of potential new funders who would not know about or get to access the organisation.

During the lockdown, EFA held a fundraising campaign to buy the girls smartphones so that they could continue their education remotely.

“We saw a huge digital divide for rural Morocco compared to urban Morocco. Many of these girls didn’t have their smartphones. For many of them accessing the internet was hard also in addition to not having devices. So this campaign meant that we could buy 25 tablets to ensure that at least every girl sitting her final year exam did not have to despair completely.”

Omar felt happy to see the girls smiling “knowing that they had some kind of lifeline to their education at that time.”

Even now some of the EFA girls haven’t fully recovered from the upheaval the pandemic caused and are catching up. But fortunately, most of the girls’ baccalaureate grades are still well above the national average. Project Soar also upholds similar academic success with their girls.

Both Bousbibit and Omar treasure the personal and educational development of the girls.

“We have Oumaima who has won one of 20 places in the prestigious journalism school in Rabat, and Aziza who started as a young Soar girl and is now both a Soar Facilitator whilst working in her local government,” says Bousbibit.

Likewise, Omar has seen the success of many EFA girls. Some are even on university scholarships, became teachers, and are quickly excelling in their careers. They value their communities and are happy to help through their newly-learned knowledge. Omar also takes pride in the ties EFA girls still keep.

“We see some of the girls coming back and giving support to the younger girls… so there’s a very strong community spirit in these girls, both one that they’d grown up in their villages but also the one that they created or been brought into in the EFA family.”

The organisation has more big plans and some are already in motion. They continue to pair traditional education with other promising approaches. Their yoga teacher training programme is a recent example. It examines the importance of mindfulness and is led by a yoga expert.

Stabilisation after the Covid-19 impact remains the main goal, but Omar is already excited about the new batch of young girls that will be introduced to the family in September.

This article is part of African Women in Media (AWiM) Graduate Trainee Programme in collaboration with FOJO Media Institute