Experience Sharing from the Rural Development Project for Taourirt-Taforalt in Morocco: Coping with Constraints to Reach Women

Project Objectives

1. The Rural Development Project for Taourirt -Taforalt is implemented in eastern Morocco, an arid region where livestock raising (sheep and goats) is a major economic activity. In recent years, as a result of prolonged drought, the area’s natural resource base has deteriorated sharply, particularly its rangelands, forests and water resources. This situation impacts negatively on the income levels of the people living in the area.

2. The project, launched in 1998, was specifically designed to address these difficulties. Its main objectives are to:

• halt the degradation of natural resources;
• improve agricultural and livestock productivity; and
• support the integration of social and economic components, with an emphasis on including rural women in development activities.

Social and Economic Characteristics of Women

3. Women play an important role in development activities. Their responsibilities include:

• home management and childcare;
• fuelwood collection. Fuelwood collection, particularly for cooking, takes place at least once a week. It is a very time-consuming task. Women travel for up to three hours and as far as six km to find fuelwood. Poor households cannot afford alternative types of energy such as gas;
• water fetching. This task is especially difficult because of water shortages in the area. At least once a day, women travel as far as 3 km to fetch water, which takes them up to 1.5 hours;
• livestock production. Women are responsible for raising and milking cows and goats. They also raise poultry, rabbits and turkeys (30% of which are used for family consumption);
• agricultural production. Women’s tasks include weeding, olive harvesting and crop irrigation; and
• handicrafts production. About 80% of rural women are involved in handicrafts production, an activity characteristic of the area (50% for local needs and 30% for income-generation).

Involvement of Rural Women

4. A principal goal of the project is to promote gender equality. All project activities aim to support women’s and men’s daily activities and to prepare the ground for participants to assume ownership of project activities and sustain them after project completion.

5. In this context, the project aims to:

• reduce women’s daily workload and encourage women to protect the environment;
• enhance women’s skills in agriculture, livestock raising and handicrafts in order to help them improve production quality. Better production will translate into increased incomes and eventually greater empowerment of women in society;
• support and organize extension services targeted at rural women.

6. The project faces a number of serious constraints in its efforts to reach out to and work with women. These include:

• the high rate of illiteracy among women, which negatively influences their knowledge levels and exposure to new ideas;
• the scattered nature of settlements, making it difficult to organize people into groups and associations;
• weak infrastructure in terms of availability of drinking water, electricity, health centres, etc. These services represent a priority for the local population, especially women, but they are largely outside the scope of the project;
• scarcity of work opportunities in the area due to the depressed state of agriculture and livestock production as a result of drought;
• limited participation of women in household decision-making processes;
• unwillingness of some men to allow women to participate in project activities such as literacy classes, field days and visits;
• few financial resources available to women, which limits their ability to contribute to service costs;
• low income of men, who in turn cannot invest in developing activities benefiting women;
• difficulty for women to access credit from banks, because bank terms are inappropriate to rural women’s resources; and
• dearth of qualified women extension agents. More women extension agents are needed to work with women, helping them to articulate their needs and to organize themselves accordingly, and also to provide women with the technical knowledge they need to improve their skills and livelihoods.

7. Given the lack of a comprehensive study assessing the conditions and needs of rural women, the Provincial Directorate of Agriculture (DPA) of Oujda, the project’s implementing agency, has relied on the existing extension units to identify areas of intervention in favour of women. When a local extension unit had no women extension agents, the DPA has collaborated with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to extend project services to women. Interventions have included:

• Support to traditional industries through the provision of appropriate inputs to women’s associations:
  • supporting the poultry-raising sector through the distribution of chicks; and
  • supporting goat-raising activities, including delivery of goats, training and joint marketing.
• Involvement of women in natural resources conservation:
  • training women to use energy economically (e.g. fuel-efficient stoves); and
  • training women to use water appropriately.
• Staff development:
  • organizing courses to enhance women’s awareness; and
  • building capacity in different areas.
• Vocational support for women’s organizations:
  • establishing links with NGOs; and
  • establishing women’s associations.

8. In all its interventions, the DPA has sought to:

• Consult men about activities designed for women and seek men’s support to ensure the success of these activities;
• Avoid burdening women with new activities, and instead providing extension services, vocational training and other support for traditional activities such as agriculture and handicrafts, or decreasing women’s workloads through labour-saving techniques such as fuel-efficient stoves;
• Involve NGOs and local associations whenever possible, as they have proved to be more effective than government agencies in contacting the local population, organizing women into associations, eliciting their participation in activities and providing services. One reason it is more difficult for government agencies to mobilize community participation and self-reliance is that communities tend to have higher expectations from government bodies, relying on them ‘to fix the problem’.

Results So Far

9. Rural women have responded to the project with enthusiasm, demonstrating their willingness to contribute to planned activities both materially and morally. They have, for instance:

• identified activities that they intend to carry out;
• contributed monetarily (about 20 dirhams per woman per month) to activities related to traditional industries; and
• participated in awareness-raising events.

10. Despite some significant progress (as shown in the Table), project activities have only addressed a fraction of women’s needs, and have not initiated a process whereby the women – and even the men – in the community organize themselves to respond to some of women’s priorities. For this reason, the project is considering alternative approaches that will have a greater impact on women’s livelihoods by mobilizing additional resources from the community.

Achievements to Date of the Rural Development Project for Taourirt – Taforalt

Rural Women Activities

Main Lessons Learned

11. The project has faced various social, institutional and technical challenges in its efforts to work with women in the project area:

• The project realized that targeting women as a separate group in the community would not lead to significant and sustainable improvements in women’s livelihoods. Instead, it is working with men, convincing them to be attentive to women’s needs and to respond to these needs through the allocation of adequate community resources.
• Reaching out to women requires more women extension agents than currently available in the extension services. The recruitment of additional women, the logical solution, is unfeasible because of budget austerity. Another solution is to work with the local NGOs, which are developing very quickly throughout Morocco. Through joint agreements, the project may channel some of its services through NGOs, particularly agricultural extension, vocational training, literacy training, and group formation and organization.
• Development projects impose new burdens on women in terms of time. This is why the analysis of women’s workload is important, and projects should include actions to reduce women’s burdens (e.g. the construction of potable water networks, the provision of fuel-efficient stoves, machines for grinding grain, etc.). Also, the impact of all project activities (even those not specifically targeting women) on women’s workloads should be assessed.
• Development projects impose new financial constraints on women. For instance, if the project provides women with animals (goats, sheep and rabbits), it should also ensure that women have access to affordable animal feed, veterinary care and technical information.

Date: April 2002

Contact Information

Mr Mohammed Sebgui,
Head of the Project Management Unit, Rural Development Project for Taourirt – Taforalt, Provincial Directorate of Agriculture Oujida,
Tel: 00212 56 682504 Fax: 00212 56 798498
E-mail: msebgui@yahoo.fr