High Atlas Foundation's Imagine Workshop in Morocco.
High Atlas Foundation
Women's Empowerment for economic, social and environmental development
HAF has had critical successes in engaging women in the management, monitoring, and institutionalizing processes of sustainable agriculture, overcoming gender barriers as a result. These strategies are vital in order for actual socioeconomic and environmental improvements to take hold. Empowerment outcomes with women’s groups in different regions of Morocco have been enabled by the Imagine workshop, which takes place over four days and 32 hours. These workshops help build the personalized vision of the women participants, provide the setting and coaching in order to analyze social relationships, including familial relationships that may promote and/or need strengthening in order to gain the support needed to achieve greater levels of self-determination and economic benefits. Imagine workshops, however, are not solely for women - men have and will continue to be encouraged to participate in empowerment workshops such as Imagine to support a holistic community empowerment process. As a result of these workshops, beneficiaries often join together to create cooperatives and self-employment initiatives. For example, 178 women now earn income from 13 new cooperatives which operate fruit tree and medicinal plant nurseries, engage in food processing, keep bees, and more.
The progress of a community is directly correlated with the advancement of women and their capability to participate in economic, social and environmental development. Most women in rural areas have fewer opportunities to participate economically due to the social pressures found within their communities. In order to overcome this boundary, men must be involved in the gender equality process - by including them, they may no longer be barriers to women's financial and emotional independence, but advocates.
Empowerment workshops such as Imagine can do more harm than good if they are not implemented in the proper way. This means that the program must continue to follow up with participants and provide them with the resouces they need to more effectively act on the goals they identified throughout the course of the workshop. Following the workshops, HAF supports participants in pursuit of self-identified new economic endeavors. Through entrepreneurship and skills development (primarily in the agricultural sector), participants can work collaboratively toward increasing incomes and economic protections for themselves, growing networks which foster continued confidence for economic engagement.