Illiteracy Effects on Local Development in the Moroccan Rural World: Challenges and Recommendations
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Abstract
This paper fundamentally aspires to make context-based recommendations to the increasingly rising number of Moroccan female cooperatives in rural areas, particularly in the region of Fes-Meknes. Similarly, it endeavors to problematize illiteracy and its effects on local and regional development among rural women in the aforementioned region. It must be noted that solidarity cooperatives unquestionably help mitigate both feminine poverty and unemployment, and simultaneously incrementally establish an ongoing entrepreneurial platform for rural women. Such a platform can directly grant the potentiality of helping these women make quantum leaps in development, as well as become socio-culturally emancipated from the stereotypes and clichés that have kept them invisible for decades in the so-called domestic sphere. The data gathered by means of focus groups’ sessions in different Fes-Meknes areas and villages, Ifrane, Azrou, Imouzzer, Sefrou and Ain Louh, was of paramount importance in making recommendations that are realistically inspired and meticulously drawn from research informants whose participation in local and regional development, albeit challenges, has drawn a significant amount of attention from state actors, such as the Office of Development and Cooperation (ODCO) and associations of civil society, such as the Moroccan Center for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (MCISE). One can confidently state that human development can solely be born out of solidarity, collaboration and encouragement in order to ultimately defy social ills and create seamless cohesion and prosperity.
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