Virtual Magazine of Morocco on the Web
Morocco Week in Review 
March 1, 2008

The High Atlas Foundation Plants 33,000 Fruit Trees in Rural Morocco.
During the month of February, the High Atlas Foundation and its partners planted 33,000 fruit trees with twenty villages in the Imenane and Azzadene Valleys of Morocco's High Atlas Mountains. This project is a partnership among the High Atlas Foundation, the Global Diversity Foundation, the Association des Amis du CHU, the Province d' Al Haouz, the Marrakech Department of Waters and Forests, the Department of Agriculture for the High Atlas, the Marrakech21 Foundation, Dar Tassa, Kasbah Tamadot, and Kasbah Toubkal.

Rabat, Morocco (PRWEB) February 28, 2008

During the month of February the High Atlas Foundation and its partners planted 33,000 fruit trees (cherry, apple, peach, and quince) with villages in the Imenane and Azzadene Valleys in Morocco's High Atlas Mountains in the Province of Marrakech. Approximately 3,000 people from twenty villages will benefit from this project. This project is a partnership among the High Atlas Foundation, the Global Diversity Foundation, the Association des Amis du CHU, the Province d' Al Haouz, the Marrakech Department of Waters and Forests, the Department of Agriculture for the High Atlas, the Marrakech21 Foundation, Dar Tassa, Kasbah Tamadot, and Kasbah Toubkal. Participants identified the types of trees they wished to receive and this partnership funded the purchase and distribution of them, as well as provided technical training in fruit tree agriculture.

The benefits of fruit tree agriculture are deep and enduring. Household incomes nearly double once trees reach maturity and the fruit is sold at local markets. Cherry trees that are just six years old produce an average of 500 MAD ($65 USD) of fruit per season, forty-two times the initial investment of 12 MAD ($1.55 USD) for the two year old sapling. Beyond the tangible economic benefits, fruit tree planting projects further democratic processes and create diverse partnerships, strengthen the environment, diversify rural economies and help to mitigate urban migration, among other things.

" Fruit trees help our families because we can eventually harvest the fruit and sell it at the souk. We can use the money from the sale of fruit to feed our families, and buy warm clothes and books for our children to go to school. Our main source of income is from fruit trees---this is our way of life. "

As one beneficiary, Brahim Disaine from the village of Arg in the Imenane Valley, stated, "Fruit trees help our families because we can eventually harvest the fruit and sell it at the souk. We can use the money from the sale of fruit to feed our families, and buy warm clothes and books for our children to go to school. Our main source of income is from fruit trees---this is our way of life."

This ongoing partnership provided 17,000 fruit trees last year and 3,400 in 2006 for villages in these valleys, allowing the planting of 53,400 fruit trees during the past three years. In addition, this partnership supports other socio-economic activities in the region including projects in public health, education, and women's development.

The High Atlas Foundation is a nonprofit organization that works to establish development projects in rural communities of Morocco that local people design and manage, and that are in partnership with government and non-government agencies. It was founded by former Peace Corps Volunteers as a way to use their experience and knowledge gained for the continued benefit of the Moroccan people. Since 2003 the organization has planted approximately 150,000 fruit trees and supports projects in the areas of potable water, irrigation, women's cooperatives, and youth development.

For more information and to view photos of the project please visit: www.highatlasfoundation.org.
Advisory Board: H.E. André Azoulay, H.E. Aziz Mekouar, Amb. Edward Gabriel, Thomas Anderson, Abdelghani Aouifia, Kamar Bencrimo, Dr. Charlie Benjamin, Dr. Wahiba Benloughmari, Scott Estergard, Dr. Lahcen Haddad, Dr. Najib Mouhtadi, Ellen Paquette.

Board of Directors: Yossef Ben-Meir (President), Liz Fanning (Vice President), Kate McLetchie (Country Director), Dan Cahill, Kimeo Carr, Mohamed Chbani, Sir Charles Dahan, Michelle Ghiselli, Charlie Kellett, Suzanne Moyer.

Contact: Kate McLetchie, Country Director at (001) 646-688-2946
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2008/02/prweb724213.htm
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Government to slash citizens' share of healthcare costs by 2015.
Rabat, Feb. 28

The Moroccan government has drafted a five-year health strategy aimed to reduce the citizens' share of the health-care costs to 25% by 2015. Mother mortality will be slashed to 50 per 100,000, and child mortality to 15 per one thousand by 2012, according to the 2008-2012 strategy presented here Thursday by health Minister, Yasmina Baddou at a colloquium called "Together for the Right to Health". Ms. Baddou said the strategy will, down the road, ensure equity in offering healthcare services between the different regions of the country, and facilitate access to healthcare for the poor and the rurals.

The government hopes through this move to restore the confidence of the Moroccans in the health system through boosting the accommodation capacity, providing information, emergency, cleanness and improving the availability of medicines, as well as cutting healthcare and medicine costs. The strategy, she said, is based on three main axes, namely repositioning the various actors in the field by striking partnerships; providing quantitatively and qualitatively sufficient services; and introducing medium and long-term strategic planning. http://www.map.ma/eng/sections/imp_social/government_to_slash/view
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A Moroccan tale of immigration
Anna Reguero  (February 25, 2008)   Staff writer

Only about 9 miles separate Morocco from Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar. Laila Lalami's book Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits opens with Murad, a tourist guide in Morocco, looking longingly across the distance, wondering how there could be such a divide in worlds over such a short distance. His plight is charted along with three other characters' as they take an inflatable motor boat illegally to Spain, in pursuit of a better life.

With illegal immigration a hot political issue as the presidential election approaches, Lalami's book is a topical selection for this year's Writers & Books event "If All of Rochester Read the Same Book ..." The program hosts book discussions all around Rochester starting today and ending in May, along with a series of movies made in or about Morocco. Lalami will visit in person at book readings, question-and-answer sessions and book signings at the end of March.

While the United States is the largest recipient of immigrants in the world, Spain is second. People travel across Africa to Morocco for the chance to cross over. "It's really kind of sobering. You realize how the discourse on immigrants is strikingly similar even across these vast distances and different countries," says Lalami. But this wasn't an influence on her story. "I wasn't writing of it at all thinking of the story in political terms," she says. "I was rather stunned after I finished the book and gave it to a friend to read and she said, 'This is a political book.'"

Her novel tells the personal lives of her characters and the emotions around their decision to immigrate. The boat trip to Spain is successful for some but not for others, who are deported to Morocco. Before telling us of their fate, Lalami backtracks to tell the story of what forced each to risk their lives, from economic strains to social and educational mishaps.

Lalami makes no decided stand on immigration but manages to humanize the issue, spotlighting the advantages as much as the disadvantages. She touches on the trend of Muslim youths turning toward conservative religion and doesn't shy away from how living in a different culture changes an individual. "It speaks to my own ambivalence as to whether people who immigrate in that way are better off," she says. Lalami recalls she was inspired by reading stories about people taking boats to Spain and became enthralled at this because of the huge risks involved. "It's the highest risk you can take," she says.

Lalami is a native of Morocco, leaving only to pursue a master's degree in London, and finally came to the United States for her doctorate at the University of Southern California. "I know if you had asked me 20 years ago if I'd be where I am today, I never thought I would be an immigrant," she says. "I was a student and the plan was, I was going to go to graduate school and I would come back and be a professor. ... Things don't turn out the way you expect. That's something that definitely resonates with me."

Lalami is now, in addition to being a novelist, a professor at the University of California-Riverside. Her latest book, to be published next year, The Outsider, is also set in Morocco, but this time it aims to tackle the political issue of liberalism and fake liberalism she feels is at the heart of politics in Morocco. "I believe in fiction that doesn't shy away from the issues of the day," she says.

For a full schedule of "If All of Rochester Read the Same Book ..." events, go to www.wab.org.
AREGUERO@DemocratandChronicle.com
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080225/LIVING/802250339/1032
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Clandestine immigrants incognito in Melilla
Feb 29, 2008

In one bloody night in October 2005, an estimated 400 immigrants rushed the razor-wire topped fence that separates Melilla from Morocco, and the border guards opened fire. When the sun rose the next morning, six people were dead, and dozens were recovering in hospital. Spain has since spent 33 million euros to seal the border once and for all, doubling the fence’s height and adding a variety of high and low-tech security features. (See slideshow at right.)

Amnesty International reports that Spain’s investment worked, pushing most of this sub-Saharan migration to the Canary Islands, causing the explosion of arrivals there in early 2006. But the fence doesn’t worry Rashid M. He’s part of a new generation of immigrants who don’t need to climb a fence or paddle a boat to Europe: they simply walk across, and the border guards don’t say a word.

Rashid isn’t the typical picture of an undocumented African immigrant in Europe, simply because he’s not African. He left his home in India over 2 years ago and has been calling the immigrant detention centre (CETI) in Melilla his home for the last nine months. While black Africans have moved on to the Canaries as their preferred point of entry, Indians and Bangladeshis have begun flowing into the CETI. They now outnumber sub-Saharan Africans by more than 2 to 1. Rashid and his compatriots didn’t climb the fence; instead they simply slipped across the border dressed as Arabs, an option not open to sub-Saharan Africans for obvious reasons.

Spanish enclaves provide easy access to Europe

Melilla is a geographic anomaly, a tiny piece of the European Union in Africa. It is, along with a few islands and the city of Ceuta, one of the last vestiges of the Spanish empire in Morocco. But more recently, Melilla has become the southernmost outpost of Fortress Europe, the continent's comprehensive network of border controls designed to keep contraband products – and people – out.

Spain’s investment is part of a Europe-wide effort to curb undocumented immigration, and it’s an impressive sight. The six-metre high triple fence is enhanced with everything from cameras and motion detectors to razor wire and a bizarre, waist-deep spider web of steel cables, intended to trip people between the fences. But Rashid doesn’t think these new defenses are the reason the border rushes stopped. “The height [of the fence] is nothing. It's the Moroccan army camped out along it that poses the problem – they shoot,” he said.

Yet while the high-profile mass fence climbs have ceased, the number of arrivals in the CETI has remained stable, said Maria Dolores, the Spanish government-appointed legal advisor there. "There are a few more people in the camp now compared to two years ago. For the last little while the Sub-Saharan Afican arrivals have dropped off because the border is more solid," Dolores said.

"Shopping days" - a step closer to Europe

Melilla, with its beaches, discotheques and European shopping malls, is a major attraction for Moroccan shoppers – not for staples, which cost 10 times less in Morocco, but for big purchases like electronics and furniture. Melilla opens the border for Moroccan shopping days: three days a week for seven months of the year, when Moroccans flood into the city to spend money.

Rashid said he obtained an Algerian identity card and memorized the information. Then it was as simple as wrapping a keffiyeh around his head and walking into Europe. “They didn’t ask me any questions, but just sent me on through because they thought I was shopping,” he said. He then made his way to the Police station where he registered as a refugee claimant with his real name and nationality.“When you arrive, they sit you down and interview you for hours, asking you all sorts of questions to find out if you're lying about where you're from and how you got there.”

Rashid explains that he left home because India's caste system meant that he would never make enough money to have a family. He saved enough for a plane ticket to Mali, where his journey towards Europe really began. From there he hitchhiked, took buses and walked through Mauritania, Algeria and Morocco before crossing into Melilla. The trip from home to the CETI took an entire year to complete. Rashid has now been living in the CETI for almost a year. “Before, if you were here for six or seven months, they'd send you to Spain, and you could work while your papers were processed. Now that's stopped. Everyone waits here.” Rashid reports that approximately 80 Indians were sent home by plane six months ago from the detention centre after seeing their applications turned down. “Those of us who are still waiting are almost out of hope. We know we're next. It's only a dream to get into Spain now.”

Rashid expects a final decision on his refugee status in the coming months.
http://www.morocconewsline.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=368
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Round table on community access took place in Morocco.
Source: UNESCOPublished Wednesday, 27 February, 2008

In the framework of the Innovative Teachers' Forum, UNESCO and Microsoft organized on 22 February 2008 in Rabat a round table to evaluate community access initiatives in Morocco. UNESCO's World Report "Towards Knowledge Societies" formulated several recommendations to be included in national strategies in order to ensure better implementation of knowledge policies. One of these recommendations suggests increasing the number of community access centres, many of which already exist in Morocco. These centres are part of e-Morocco Strategy which aims to create conditions for digital inclusion and to set up adequate infrastructure, community access and capacity building centres.

Several public and private initiatives comprise these elements with the objective to enable the young to access information and to have capacity building opportunities in ICT. Governments, experts and practitioners in the education sector increasingly recognize that information and communication technologies (ICT) can play an important role in supporting educational improvement and reform. Community access centres can enable young people to use technology to become better information seekers, analysers, problem solvers and communicators. The round table aimed at analyzing the current state of existing initiatives and evaluating how they can be mutually used to offer better capacity building opportunities to young people.
http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/17422
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