Fondation Dar Si Hmad

Fondation Dar Si Hmad is based in the Southwest of Morocco, in Sidi Ifni where it enacts its vision to “enable sustainable livelihoods and create opportunities for low-resource communities to learn and prosper,” and its mission to “promote local culture and create sustainable initiatives through education and the integration and use of scientific ingenuity within the communities of Southwest Morocco.” Since its incorporation in 2010, Dar Si Hmad has built the largest fog-collection initiative in the world and is able to meet the drinking needs of 16 villages (127 households), a change that has deeply impacted the lives of the entire community, but especially women who used to walk for 3.5 hours to bring back water and girls who are attending schools today. As part of its fund generating activity, Dar Si Hmad has run a successful Ethnographic School and hosted American students who immersed themselves in the rural Anti-Atlas world and its Amazigh inhabitants. In the city of Agadir,we have an annex where we run our educational program, “RISE,” for which we had a MEPI grant in 2015. Based on our extensive countryside work, we plan on running a rural-tech camp program to adress the inherent inequalities of rural education. Providing access for rural high schoolers, specifically young women, to discover and learn the world of computers is a segway to improving their learning and expanding their horizons. Dar Si Hmad has a successful track record of projects with high impact on the beneficiaries/participants.