Last October Mariama and I spent a busy week in Morocco.  We were there to meet potential new partners for people and places in the village of Amlougui, to visit Education for All who we have been working with for many years, and so that I could introduce Mariama to the people we work with in Morocco and take her to see the projects in action.

Our first stop was at the village of Amlougui, where we stayed for three days.  We had been introduced to Ibrahim, who will be our new partner, by our existing partner at Education for All, and we envisage us all working closely together to support the worthwhile work being done by both organisations.  Amlougui is a small rural village in the Ourika Valley.  It is a spectacular location, in the heart of the Atlas Mountains, close to a tourist route to beautiful waterfalls but still very much a traditional Berber/Amazigh village. Ibrahim is a tour guide – for many years he had been frustrated that tourists pass close by the mountain villages en route to tourist hotspots, but never learn anything about the life of the local people and never contribute anything to improve their opportunities.  So he started taking tourists to his village, initially just to his family home to eat – and since then, working with Swiss sponsors and with Brooke from the US Embassy, he has dedicated himself to improving the lives of the people in his home village.  His ambition is to help his village to grow, both in size and in breadth of opportunities – working against the trend of local people to desert their villages and move to the cities for work and for education for their children.  He is an inspirational man.

In 2017 Ibrahim was able to get funding for a pre-school for the village – this would not only provide good early years education for the children but would also free up their mothers to get work.  The pre-school is small but thriving, and is run by another inspirational local person, Salma, who is keen to learn as much as possible about play-based learning for young children and about ways to support parents in bringing up their children.  Salma speaks excellent English (self-taught from youtube!!) – she is totally supportive of Ibrahim’s ideas for the village and has so many ideas for things she can do to help the village thrive.  Salma will work alongside Ibrahim as local partner and the pre-school will be one of the places where volunteers can work – so if you have early-years experience and want to know more about this project do let us know.

The village also has a newly established Women’s Centre – we were privileged to be there for the opening and it was wonderful to see the excitement of the local women.  Ibrahim’s vision for the Women’s Centre is somewhere where local crafts can be produced to maintain traditional skills and to be a unique selling point for visitors to the village – this will provide opportunities for training and employment for some women.  Also to be a place where women can meet for education (in literacy but also in business skills) and for discussion to widen their understanding of the opportunities open to them as women in Morocco.  We hope to find volunteers to work with some of these women to help them develop their skills – the first need is for people who can help them with conversational English – currently most of them speak only Berber, but they are very keen to learn!

We then moved on to Asni to meet up with everyone from the Education for All (EFA) boarding houses.  This year most of the girls are back in the schools where they were studying before the earthquake – EFA has managed to rent houses close to these schools, but it will take some time to rebuild permanent houses following the destruction of their original boarding houses in the earthquake of 2023.  We visited the three temporary houses in Asni and it was wonderful to see the girls and house-mothers settled back in Asni again.  The rented houses are far from ideal, but it was impressive to see how the house-mothers have managed to create the same homely feel in their temporary accommodation as they always had in the purpose-built houses.  We also visited Ouirgane, about 20 minutes from Asni, which is the location of the only EFA house to survive the earthquake.  This is now operating as normal – we were made very welcome by the house-mother Naima and were able to go for a walk with some of the girls, a good opportunity to chat to them.

I was eager to visit the house in Talaat n’Yakoub – this mountain town was at the very epi-centre of the earthquake but as soon as the school reopened EFA rented a house with two house-mothers there, the first NGO to start operating again in the town.  We sent a volunteer there during 2025 and she reported that the journey to Talaat was difficult as the road had been completely destroyed, but I was determined to get there if I could.  I went in a taxi with Latifa, with plenty of food and water in case of a long journey, but it was better than I expected.  There were plenty of people working on rebuilding the road so there were some holdups, but they are making fast progress and it won’t be long before this remote town is reconnected by road to the rest of the country.  I enjoyed visiting Aicha, Badiaa and the girls, and was again impressed by how they have been able to make a home out of unsuitable rented buildings – they have even planted a garden!

That left just one house and one house-mother I hadn’t been able to meet.  Luckily the driver who took me back to the airport was persuaded to stop for 30 minutes at Tahanout so I could visit the temporary house there – Fatima made me very welcome, greeted me with tea and cakes in the traditional Moroccan style and gave me a quick tour of the house.  I was so pleased I had been able to see all the house-mothers, and as always was so impressed with how hard they work to enable their girls to complete their education.

If you are interested in volunteering, either at Asni or Amlougui, follow these links to our website or contact Musufing@travel-peopleandplaces.co.uk