Women's Empowerment in Africa

Since its founding in 2000, the High Atlas Foundation (HAF) has committed itself to offer its beneficiaries, predominantly women, training related to self-knowledge. This empowerment programming is implemented across Morocco. In total, HAF has conducted 38 such Imagine Empowerment Workshops that have impacted 900 women so far since 2017.

To gain a better understanding of how these workshops have affected the lives of participants over the last several years, HAF, in cooperation with the USA-based Empowerment Institute, is embarking on a new journey to evaluate and monitor the impact of this program.

On June 2, HAF Farmer-To-Farmer Field Officer Zineb and HAF Program Manager, Empowerment Fatima Zahra attended a virtual meeting with Theresa and Millicent, representatives from the Empowerment Institute. The meeting emphasized the importance of ongoing support groups post-workshop as a beneficial method to track the impact and sustain the growth of the Imagine program.

The main objectives of these support groups are:

1. To develop and sustain the groups through the transfer of the empowerment framework
2. To develop the skills of both the group and the the trainer(s)
3. To collect evaluative data on the Imagine Empowerment Workshop

I am greatly humbled by our partner, the Empowerment Institute, who remains supportive and even delighted to be part of the HAF journey, as they continue to engage with our team, providing the necessary support to successfully achieve our evaluation goals.

A second meeting took place on Monday, June 7 to review evaluation forms and adapt them to fit HAF's goals and vision. Now, HAF’s empowerment team is in the process of inviting former workshop participants to create a representative sample that we will then survey to explore the impact of the Imagine workshop on the personal or professional lives of these women. The representative sample is selected randomly, and women from each past group of participants will take part in this    process. By demonstrating the real impact of the Imagine program and its follow-up, the High Atlas Foundation aims to expand its partnerships with institutions seeking to support the continued self-empowerment of women, and others, throughout Morocco.