Interview with USAID

The interviews we had last Thursday were enlightening on many fronts. During the interview with USAID, we understood one of the reasons illiteracy is so high in Morocco. Other than the usual reasons students choose to drop from school (high levels poverty that don’t always allow parents to purchase school supplies and uniforms, distance from schools that discourage students from attending school, unmotivated professors that make class painful, and the presence of a mentality that sometimes does not value education), there is also the phenomenon that children learn to read and write and forget what they learned because they don’t use it often. We can totally relate to this phenomenon as any language unpracticed is easily forgotten. In the midst of rural areas, shops are dozens of kilometers away, and the written language is perhaps hundreds of kilometers away (outside the school). For people living in rural areas, taking care of cattle and agriculture are of upmost. These people need to work the land in a continuous manner for survival and cannot afford to take a break and this is why the opportunity cost of sending a student to school is high. USAID have identified that teaching is the area they focus on and together with the ministry of education and a lot of joint work examining systems from various countries, they come up with new and adapted teaching methodologies for Morocco. In collaboration with the government, they offer professors teaching modules that make teachers more effective at transferring knowledge to their students.