Of course, a pervasive issue that we have in rural Morocco is clean drinking water. We have municipalities where many girls fetch water instead of going to middle school. We have a terrible prevalence of water-bourne diseases. We have higher infant mortality in rural places.
And so, to address the widespread priority of clean drinking water with partners, in this case Yves Saint Laurent Fashion, we implemented clean drinking water initiatives and integration of irrigation infrastructure utilizing clean energy, including a solar water pump system for the nursery financed by the Moroccan company, FENELEC. From these projects, the community is in a position to enable even greater tree planting.
The other investment that we secured was connecting the 700-year-old cemetery with a road, about a kilometer in length, to the women’s co-op so that visitors of the cemetery can also visit the cooperative. Again, there are layers to this process. It began with an intercultural partnership for community planning and then moved towards cooperative building driven by women making carpets of local materials and designs based on their heritage.
This empowerment then allowed for developments in clean drinking water, irrigation, and fruit tree planting. HAF is now in the process of supporting the community’s planting of 23,000 olive trees and the newly added overlay of tree monitoring for carbon offset credits.
The High Atlas Foundation, with a full-time staff of nearly 100 people, is currently supporting nine nurseries in Morocco that house over 3.2 million trees. Just this season, we have transplanted 850,000 and we have monitored about 600,000 so far this year. This is a pilot within a broader program. Now, in addition to receiving land from the Moroccan Jewish community, we have also received land from the Moroccan government and the National Agency of Waters and Forests for tree nurseries.
And so, from this pilot creating these layers of human development with a cultural gateway, the number of visitors has grown beyond what we could have imagined. Since the start of 2023, visitors from some 40 universities (U.S. and European, but also Moroccan) have toured this pilot site and engaged in intercultural dialogues with the community members. Starting in 2021, HAF administered the USAID Dakira program for cultural preservation in Morocco, and these dialogues meet this initiative’s goals.
We’ve been visited by dozens of tourist groups, because, if people have half a day and have not had the experience of a genuine rural community visit to learn about rural life conditions, here lies this pilot just outside of Marrakech where they can see and internalize Moroccan culture, Moroccan agriculture, matters of public health related to water, and school infrastructure. In a single location, tourists can see all of these different dimensions of broad-based community development. The more people that are drawn to this experience, the more advocacy and public awareness that comes about, encouraging even more to visit.
Income generated by the Achbarou Women’s Cooperative from selling carpets and other goods to visitors keeps their families financially afloat. In some cases, this supplemental income has more than doubled the overall household income for the families. With some further investment by the National Initiative for Human Development (NIHD), the cooperative has been able to reinvest revenue from their entrepreneurial efforts into the purchase of land to build a new workplace and storefront facility. Without the scores of visitors from universities and tourism, this would not have been possible.
The Moroccan government, which for generations has prioritized Moroccan multiculturalism, saw this opportunity. Now, every time we replicate—we are currently building the fourth of such intercultural tree nurseries—the Moroccan government, through the NIHD, puts $50,000 into that nursery. In short, the Moroccan government funds a tree nursery on Moroccan Jewish community land for the greater public of that region.
