The first solar village in Morocco, Katim helped to create
Our partner organisation Fondation MVI started an ambitious solar energy project in 2015with us in 2020; creating the first entirely autonomous solar village in Morocco, which will be linked to our larger programme FAREDEIC for the production and promotion of gender-responsive community based solar solutions in Morocco. Katim Alaoui, our International Advisory Board Member, is a pharmacology professor at the Rabat Faculty of Medicine and the Director of Fondation MVI pour la Recherche et la Sauvegarde de l’Arganier. She is also one of the winners of the 2016 GJCS winner for technical solutions (together with Jamila Idbourrous – director of the UCFA – Union des Coopératives Féminines d’Argan). She won the award for introducing and promoting affordable thermo-solar cooking solutions for rural areas in the south of Morocco. In oct 2017, she, with the Fondation and the support of MASEN, inaugurated the first solar powered village in Morocco, in the region of Essaouira.
Celebrating traditional knowledge and cultural heritage
The village, which is very isolated and had no electricity, is now equipped with solar street lighting, a solar water pump, a collective thermo-solar oven (reaching temperatures over 250 degrees) and 15 thermo-solar cookers (110-120°). The village also inaugurated in October 2019 an educational and cultural centre for the preservation of ancestral knowledge on the transformation of argan oil (linked to a local women’s cooperative), celebrating Moroccan women’s unique traditional knowledge and cultural heritage. The solar technologies (cookers and food dryers) that are going to be produced in Morocco, thanks to our FAREDEIC programme, will not only empower local women, by enabling their stronger involvement in Morocco’s energy transition and climate policies, but will also create local jobs for rural women in 2 regions of Morocco: Souss Massa and Tanger-Tetouan.
This project has recently been nominated for the Trophées de l’Adaptation Climatique en Méditerranée, of which we are very proud.
