The Bernard Mejean Fund for Girls' Education

This blog is a reflection from a recent beneficiary of HAF’s self-empowerment workshop in Douar Sidi Ali Ofaris, Siti Fadma Province.

My name is Malika. I am 23 years old, and I live in Ourika in the region of Marrakech, Morocco. My dream, from a young age, was to finish my studies and become a lawyer that defends people's cases, especially women. Unfortunately, I dropped out of school and five years later I got married.

Three years have passed, while all I was doing was sitting at home, doing nothing. I thought of going back to school, but I had a fear of failure. Back then I did not know that failure is not the end of the world, but it is in itself a backward plan to increase your progress.

That was until an association came to my hometown and started a project that aims to help women learn how to read and write, and fate wanted me to be the chosen one to teach them.

 In one of the classes, the head of the project visited the town along with the other teachers to deliver a workshop for women on self-empowerment. In the four days of the training, I grew and learned a lot, including how to value myself because it is my right. I also learned to not pressure myself with things that exceed my capacity 

This training was delivered to us at a time when we needed it most. For example, as I mentioned earlier, I really wanted to go back to school and develop myself so I can become what I had dreamed of since childhood. However, I was hesitant or more likely afraid that I would fail. This training taught me that the flaw is not in failure, but in my failure to make any effort to reach for what I wanted.

I became convinced and rather determined to fulfill my dream, God willing, and here I am studying with vigor and optimism hoping for the best.

Now I am not afraid of failing. Now I am not as weak as I was four days ago. Now I am completely ready to start striving to achieve my dream. Now I have taken a step forward, a step that I was hesitant to take, but not anymore. Now I am a different person than I was before. This is thanks to God Almighty first because it was God who made us cross paths with the High Atlas Foundation.

Second, thanks to the people who made this great effort. At the top of the list are Mrs. Amina, the head of this project, Mr. Hassan and Mrs. Amina, the self-empowerment training teachers. I'd also like to thank Sanae and Imane who became like sisters to me during this workshop. All my thanks and appreciation to them.

I also cannot forget my husband because he has been encouraging since the beginning. Thank you for believing in me and for being in my life.

Now thanks to these people I see myself as a successful attorney, defending a case in court.

October 17 marks the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The commemoration of this day suggests that the way to end poverty is not a matter shrouded in mystery. In fact, its celebration denotes that, at a minimum, the manner to end poverty is most likely established knowledge. While it could withstand further evaluation, its people-centered methodology is tested as plain as day, and it is as well understood as the brutality of en masse denial of the potential of our humanity.

The process of planning actions that eradicate poverty conditions is synonymous with the experience of designing sustainable development or enterprises in societies that experience long life. In a nutshell, we – the public of all walks – must plan together in consideration of the great range of factors that impact and are impacted by social change.

The intentional and unintentional forces that are leveled by societies, and that manifest due to the natural world, that cause growth or demise of an intervention in promoting our general welfare, are relevant in the different areas where we seek improvement. For example, what are the economic and environmental implications of an agricultural enterprise? What are the political repercussions of ending women’s illiteracy? What are the cultural dimensions that hinder or set free the innovation of youth? What are the technical and financial assessments of rural cooperatives’ product-processing activity? What has history taught us about the future when we establish clean drinking water projects that rid ourselves of water-borne diseases and the loss of infant life?

We must view development from all these lenses and dimensions if we are to establish projects that can, over time, strike the deepest blows into poverty. Most critically, how do we enact this kind of multifaceted dimensional planning, considering that no one person or agency can bring to bear all of these angles to identifying an effective social action? It requires the participation of the people, whose poverty is intended to be eradicated, and who are targeted to be the beneficiaries of change, to engage in their own assessment of what will be best for them, involving the inclusive dialogue among women and men, members of all ages, and sectors. Individually, they combine into the many points of view necessary in achieving the balanced design of poverty-ending projects by and for the people.

I project that the people who experience harsh poverty situations, carried down from the past and transmitted further into the future, will one day rejoice when international and domestic developmental assistance will be applied to accomplish the priorities that they determine through their own analysis, discussion, and consensus-building procedures. The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty will never know its last heralding without a number of key realities, one of them being that the matter of allocation of development finance is a community matter, and not for the strings pulled by external others. Further, the world’s Sustainable Development Goals will finally be a juggernaut on the high-road to their fulfillment, when their composition is the aggregate of all the self-defined needs of local communities and neighborhoods on the planet.

Since most poverty on earth afflicts rural people, we should acknowledge that food growers’ associations must also be processors of their bounty. Growers’ capacities must be invested in, to enable the physical infrastructure of water efficiency, to improve upon cultivation and their abilities, and to forge their cooperatives in partnerships that help attain market reach and sustainability. Many nations see the majority of rural girls not going on to secondary school, yet they can and should be breadbaskets for themselves and the blocs of nations of which they are part. A travesty of rural poverty is that it takes place in the very space where there is the vastest potential for most prosperous shared growth.

An astute truth of this International Day is that it is inextricably bound to human rights. How can we manifest the change in our hearts when we have never been asked what may be our own personal vision for our future? How can we courageously put forward our own interests when they have been denied and unacknowledged for the most part of our lives?

It is so immensely difficult and perhaps unfair to expect that we speak to power – which dominates in hamlets as it does in world affairs – when those groups who wield it have done so for ages. The eradication of poverty must start with dismantling those inhibitions and doubts that prevent the assertion of our self-belief, and instead lead to the questioning and redefinition of those relationships that oppress and control. It is then, when we enter into development planning, that we become most robust in our discovery and achievement of opportunities that will once and for all bring poverty to heel, and give rise to our best days on earth.