New Initiatives Benefit Youth and Women
Enrollments at Amideast training centers in Rabat and Casablanca office have averaged around 10,000 in recent years, driven by the growing interest in English in the Francophone country and the need for specialized professional skills training. These numbers are beginning to rise as Amideast/Morocco embarks on new initiatives targeting the country’s youth unemployment challenge.
Young people in Morocco are particularly vulnerable to chronic unemployment. Urban youth between the ages 15 and 24 face a 33 percent unemployment rate, but the highest unemployment rates — close to 60 percent — are found among high school and college graduates. Moreover, nearly eight out of 10 in the 15–24 age bracket have never worked or have been out of work for a year or longer; the longer these youth remain outside the workforce, the harder it is for them to break out of this vicious cycle.
In 2010, Morocco’s national phosphates company, OCP Groupe, chose Amideast to develop an employability skills development program focused on several urban areas where its industrial activities are concentrated. The objective: to give unemployed graduates training in transferrable skills that enable them to overcome hurdles to their employment. Not only do such programs address the country’s high unemployment rates for youth, especially recent graduates; they also enlarge the pool of available labor for Moroccan companies in sectors that are seeking to become globally competitive but lack the manpower to do so.
In 2011, Amideast partnered with OCP Groupe to launch Training for Success , a five-month program focused on language and communications skills for the workforce. Two rounds of training benefited some 600 young men and women in Rabat, Casablanca, and elsewhere, with more than two out of three able to land an entry-level job.
The success of that effort has led to an expansion of the partnership’s scope. In late 2012, Amideast assumed management of the Rhamna Skills Center in Benguerir, opened by OCP Groupe to provide training to recent graduates and college undergraduates ages 18–30 years that will enhance their employability, encourage entrepreneurship, and strengthen the leadership capacities of local associations. Amideast also manages youth centers established by OCP in 2013 and 2014 in two other locales. The centers provided training to a total of 1,400 youths in 2014, but each is expected to reach an annual capacity of 1,000.
Recently Amideast entered into a partnership with Kosmos Energy to provide a similar mix of professional development, employability, and entrepreneurship skills training near its operating facilities. An initial training round is underway, benefiting 300 young people.
Amideast/Morocco has been advancing economic empowerment of Moroccan women through two initiatives. Beginning in fall 2011, it has provided training and mentoring to aspiring women entrepreneurs through the Arab Women’s Entrepreneurship Project (AWEP), an Amideast initiative solely funded by Citi Foundation. Sixty women have received AWEP’s combination of basic business skills training and mentoring to date, and 20 more will soon be selected for the next AWEP training round, due to begin in early 2015.
In summer 2014, it joined with the Union for the Mediterranean to offer its new Skills for Success™-Employability Training for Women in Morocco. Ninety young Moroccan women who have recently graduated from high school have begun the training program.
Study Abroad for Americans
The Amideast office in Morocco also manages a portfolio of study abroad programs for Americans that keeps on growing. For decades, it has customized short-term programs on behalf of a variety of institutions, lending its on-the-ground presence to provide services that are crucial to success, such as predeparture orientations and arranged homestays, onsite orientation, cultural support, Arabic language instruction, cultural activities and excursions, and monitoring.
Programs that offer intensive Arabic and French language study are popular, enrolling nearly half of the 200 students who participated in short-term programs last year. But institutions are drawn to Morocco for a variety of other reasons, as was demonstrated by that year’s offering of programs tailored to interests ranging from gender and public health issues, engineering, and higher education in Morocco.
In 2007, Amideast launched its own semester abroad program in collaboration with Mohammed V University-Agdal in Rabat. Today, Amideast’s Education Abroad Programs in the Arab World offers summer, semester, and full-year options in Rabat as well as at Al Akhawayn University, with a combined annual enrollment exceeding 100 students.
Meanwhile, Amideast/Morocco also implemented the Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) Abroad program for Morocco, enabling eight American teens to spend an academic year in Morocco.
