Kids with love, education first
Quality education in the world, case study : Morocco.
Hello everyone ! We are two young women, Farah and Alicia, and we are going to explain to you, how this photo inspired a future project.
The beginning
In 2019, before Covid-19 and all the sad pandemic, Farah had a wonderful opportunity : go to Morocco to initiate humanitarian action with her friends. They had to build a stadium for children, in a small village without money and resources. After many days, the stadium was built and children were very happy and grateful. This photo just above is showing Farah (with her white tee shirt), with all the little girls of the village school. All those girls were so happy to receive so much attention and love. There is another photo juste here which shows the exact definition of happiness.
When I left for Morocco I did not expect to be so touched and overwhelmed. Indeed, I was aware of the poverty and inequalities in certain areas of the world but when I had the opportunity to be in the heart of it all, the first thing that struck me was the love and benevolence that reigned in the village. To give you an example, the women of the village made us lunch every day, they prepared delicious specialties typically Moroccan to give us strength to achieve our projects. The children stayed, played, discussed with us and were very grateful for the help we gave them. Finally, the day that will remain the most engraved in my mind is the day of the inauguration of the playground and the classroom where the children discovered and enjoyed their new learning and fun spaces. We had organized a great Olympic game that pitted several teams against each other in rounds of soccer, basketball, ping pong and badminton. Anyway, this trip will stay with me for the rest of my life, I have grown, learned and matured and I felt useful.
Farah Birhadiouen
You can find a testimonial article written by Farah who recounts her adventure and her emotions through this trip. You can also get an idea of what a humanitarian trip is like, what a typical day in Morocco is like, told from the heart of the action.
Our reflection
When Farah returned from this trip, she was very emotional about all this love and satisfaction to help someone in need. She recounted this humanitarian trip to Alicia, who was fascinated. Help and care for people who need it, is a value for us. After some reflection, we noticed the lack of access to education in this village. Children had a school but conditions to learn were not satisfying.
Too many students per class, not enough resources for good education, not real class levels… Education in this village is totally the opposite of France. The lack of means is felt on this picture.
Then , we felt compelled to act.
The Dare to challenge was THE moment to talk about this issue. It’s not only a moroccan issue, but a world issue in all the underdeveloped countries and regions.
Let’s talk about the issue with some statistical datas.
Some statistics
- 17% of the world’s children, adolescents and youth, are out of school.
- 31% in sub-Saharan Africa and 21% in central Asia, VS 3% in Europe and north America.
- 200 million of children will not attend school in 2030.
- 79% of the wealthier families achieved in school VS 34% of the poor families achieved in school.
- 500 million of children can’t attend distance school (since the pandemic).
Maybe some solutions
A parallel can be made with other countries un the world, which also lack access to quality education. We did some researches on Open IDEO site to find solutions, and we found a first case which is relative to our issue.
This case is talking about the difficult school in India, one of the most underdeveloped country in the world.
“According to the Ministry of Human Resources Development in India, 62.1 million children are out of school.”
For solutions, the article talks about more places in class (because those classes are now overcrowded and it’s not efficient for education), and access to class online maybe. They need some money to realize this goal but it’s a good solution to help children in India. It’s possible to consider those same solutions for children in Morocco, but we will need lot of money.
A second parallel can be made with underdeveloped countries, where adults don’t have opportunities of work because of the lack of education. Some women and men can’t read, write or speak another language because they never learned before. More serious than work : they don’t have access to medical care, or anything because of the language barrier.
“Poverty and homelessness affect women and minorities disproportionately”
“Language is a major barrier to health care and demand for medical interpreters is growing rapidly.”
Their solutions are about translators, to give access to medical treatment and all. We can use this idea as a model for our issue. A translator can be a good idea in schools with no resources. The communication will be easier between teachers and people who help them, and the translator will be able to help children in their education. We think also to take translators as teachers (not in substitution but in addition). With time, children will be able to speak two or three languages and translators and the will become adults so translators will no longer be needed for adults. Knowledge is transmitted throughout generations, we just need a good beginning.
Those Open IDEO have lot of ideas for solutions but solutions in future because we are only at the beginning of the project and we need some help and money to realize it. For the moment, we have to act to our scale.
Interview
We interviewed a person who was part of the humanitarian trip with Farah, and one school teacher in Morocco who we spoke to by phone.
We created a questionnaire to better understand our problem and issues. We collected about 170 responses, which allowed us to better determine our objectives.
The first conclusion we can draw concerns children. It seems that the most concrete way to help children (according to 89% of respondents) is through humanitarian aid. 71% of the people interviewed said they had no new ideas for action and that they had complete confidence in us. However, the remaining 29% and the two interviewees were able to provide us with new measures to put in place to help children. For example, it was proposed to create a real follow-up of children in difficulty (school or financial), to equip homes with technology in order to introduce online education, or to facilitate teacher training. The interview brought us the idea of facilitating extra-curricular activities in order to create new passions/vocations in children.
The second conclusion we can draw concerns the people who are interested in our project. 92% of the people interviewed think that the project has value, but 8% are skeptical because there are already many associations of this kind and they don’t feel that there is a real interest. Considering only the 92% who are in favour of the project, only 10% of them have already participated in a humanitarian action, but 47% of them would be ready to actively participate in our project. We noticed that the most common age group in our positive responses was between 18 and 24, and that 25–34 year olds were equally enthusiastic. Unfortunately, it seems that for 59% of them, studies and lack of money are a brake on financial participation in the project. Fortunately, the only thing we expect from volunteers is their time and goodwill.
The last conclusion we can make is about the limitations of our project. We have already mentioned the small percentage of people who are skeptical about the project, but we have also received some constructive criticism of the humanitarian action as such. Firstly, some people felt that humanitarian action in Morocco was not a priority. They thought that some countries like Ethiopia or Afghanistan would need it more. Secondly, some humanitarian aid has been the cause of tragedies, which leads respondents to be sceptical about NGO. Some of the responses refer to the Oxfam case which, after having carried out numerous humanitarian interventions in Haiti, was accused of sexual harassment and rape. We obviously consider these acts as crimes against humanity, but we can understand this mistrust. We will therefore do our utmost to be as transparent and knowledgeable as possible on these matters.
We have to act
According to the goal 4, quality education, we have to aim at an equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
To aim at this goal, we have to inform people about the issue.
We created an Instagram account, www.instagram.com/kidswithlove2022/ and a Twitter account, www.twitter.com/kidswithlove/ to share our project on social medias and to reach as many people as possible. If you are interested, don’t hesitate to suscribe ;)
Actions in process
After some researches and analysis, we made a power point to explain our subject to our class and we made some updates on our social networks to inform people, we created an interview, we made type profiles of our future “customers”, their journey and our journey… We did a real analytical work to carry out this project which is close to our hearts. All those actions were important to target the principal missions and actions to be carried out once the NGO is launched.
The first real action will be about money. We will do everything in our power to raise as much money as possible from volunteers. We will do this through fundraising events, raffles and cake sales. Garage sales and online fundraising are also good ways to raise money. All this money will of course be used for the humanitarian weeks where we will help the children as Farah did.
Regarding the school material the children need, we will collect second hand material to give them a second life but also buy new material so that the children are in the most comfortable environment. Initially we will need simple materials such as pens, notebooks, books etc. but later on we would like to be able to offer children digital materials in order to be as close as possible to the news of the world but also to facilitate access to online education during problems such as the Covid 19 pandemic.
Finally, we would also like to expand our NGO as much as possible in order to recruit as many volunteers as possible and to be known by as many people as possible. For this, social networks are an excellent means of communication but we would also like to do advertising campaigns or even collaborate with public people interested in the project to give us as much visibility as possible.
We hope our project is interesting for you, and we hope that, perhaps, you will join us !
Nelson Mandela said one day,
Education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world.
