Within These Walls: Educating Girls in Rural Morocco

This series was made at a girls’ dormitory in rural Morocco. Supported by a Fulbright grant in 2004, I returned to the moderate Muslim country, where I lived for years as a young girl.

The problem of girls’ illiteracy is especially urgent in the countryside, where the average attendance rate falls as low as 16.5 percent in the most isolated areas. To combat the problem, the king of Morocco has supported a national initiative to build dormitories near secondary schools to help girls in remote areas continue their education. As the king said, “We have focused our interest, first, on rural women, the group most affected by the ills of illiteracy and poverty – two issues I firmly believe are at the heart of human rights, just as they may constitute structural obstacles to democracy.”

My exploration led me to the Dar Taliba, a girls’ dormitory located in southern Morocco, in El Hanchane, a small dusty town between the tourist spots of Marrakesh and Essaouira. Although the dormitory was designed for sixty students, one hundred and eleven girls boarded there. They were between the ages of 13 and 18. Some went home on the weekends, while many others, because of finances or distance, stayed at the dormitory for weeks at a time.