Dar Si Hmad for Development, Education and Culture is an independent nonprofit organization founded in 2010 promoting local culture and sustainable initiatives through education and the integration of scientific ingenuity in Southwest Morocco. We operate North Africa's largest fog harvesting project, providing villages with access to potable water. Our Water School and Girls' E-Learning Programs build capacity in the Anti-Atlas Mountains. Through our Ethnographic Field School, researchers and students engage with local communities in Agadir, Sidi Ifni, and the rural Aït Baamrane region for meaningful cross-cultural exchange.

Monday, May 8, 2017

The Environmental Youth Ambassadors at Oxford

Part 3 in our series about the EYA Conservation Optimism Trip is this report from Salma Edrif about a seminar she and her colleagues gave at the University of Oxford.


Bringing Dar Si Hmad to a wider audience, the Environmental Youth Ambassadors visited the University of Oxford as part of their recent trip to the UK. They were accompanied by our research partner Becca Farnum to give a seminar at Stanford House.

The seminar took place on Monday 24th of April and was titled “Fog, Education, and Resilience: A Case Study of Sustainable Development in Southwest Morocco”.


The 45 minutes presentation attended by students, researchers and scholars shed the light on Dar Si Hmad’s work as a local contribution to the development agenda set by the United Nations for 2020.

I spoke about sustainable development, water security, and community resilience in Morocco, moving on to highlight how Dar Si Hmad’s local interventions through fog warvesting, women's empowerment, and the Water School contribute to 11 out of the 15 Global Sustainable Development Goals.

Especially for the seminar, my colleague Abdelhaq engineered a transportable miniature of our CloudFisher net to bring the fog-harvesting to life in the classroom, an example of the technology and scientific ingenuity coming out of the Global South.



























 



Meanwhile, Mahdi Lafram introduced the Water School, RISE & THRIVE professional development programs, and Environmental Youth Ambassadors initiative, which tackle issues of equitable education and opportunity in Southwest Morocco.

Following the presentation, we facilitated a discussion with the attendees reflecting on how the local case study of Dar Si Hmad is shaped by and can inform wider narratives of development, before inviting everyone to explore fog harvesting using the model net.

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