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The Challenge
Deep in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains, women face a devastating combination of extreme isolation, poverty, and virtually no access to education or healthcare. Illiteracy rates among rural women reach 90%. Only one in four girls enroll in secondary school, and many cannot contribute when winter snow makes mountain paths impassable.
For many girls, opportunities end at twelve. They spend their teenage years confined to remote villages, waiting for a marriage offer that feels less like a beginning and more like the only option left. Rural women live four years less than their urban counterparts, a gap driven by limited healthcare, economic deprivation, and the absence of choice.
These women are master artisans who crochet beautiful winter clothing, spending countless hours creating pieces for their families and communities. Yet, they have never been paid for this work. Their talent generates no income. Their expertise earns no recognition.
Our Solution
The High Atlas Foundation is working with four women-run cooperatives - Jaouharat Women's Cooperative (7 members), Achbarou Women's Cooperative (19 members), Atlas Talat-n-Mimoun Women's Cooperative (26 members), and Tankra Women's Cooperative (16 members) - to produce winter clothing for schoolchildren throughout rural Morocco.
This initiative creates a powerful cycle of impact:
This isn't charity, it's investment. It recognizes these women not as recipients of aid but as entrepreneurs waiting for their first real customer.
Your Impact
A five-dollar contribution purchases winter clothing from a rural cooperative and places it in the hands of a child who needs it. But that five dollars does even more: it tells a woman crocheting in a mountain village that her work has value. It helps a girl attend school through the winter. It proves to a cooperative that they can sustain themselves.
Five dollars funds warmth, but it also funds dignity, opportunity, and the understanding that women in Morocco's most isolated villages deserve the same chances as anyone else.
Why This Matters
Education changes everything. Educated women marry later and by choice. They're less likely to die in childbirth and more likely to raise healthy, educated children. They earn more, support their families, and break cycles of poverty that have persisted for generations.
But when 90% of rural girls cannot read or write, when secondary school feels as distant as another country, these transformations remain theoretical. This initiative creates the conditions for change: income for women, education access for children, and visible proof that economic independence is possible.
Join Us
The women of the Atlas Mountains have spent generations making something from nothing, raising families in unforgiving terrain, creating beautiful work with their hands, and holding communities together through poverty and isolation. Imagine what they could do with resources and recognition.
Your contribution, no matter the size, helps transform skilled artisans into business owners, isolated workers into cooperative members, and invisible labor into recognized value.
Will you invest in these women? Will you help give them the warmth to survive this winter and the tools to rewrite every winter that follows?
Jamie Fico’s life was one of purpose, compassion, and determination--an exemplary case of someone finding their true passion and pursuing it with all of their heart. She unexpectedly passed away on November 5th, 2024, leaving behind her parents, sister, and a wide network of friends and colleagues who she had developed close bonds with across her life and work.
Your donation empowers women, unites and strengthens communities, and connects generations through cultural dialogue and preservation.
