The rugs sold, and then the women in Akrich learned to read the invoices

In a village in Morocco's High Atlas foothills, <strong>Samira Driouch</strong> leads a weaving cooperative whose first months brought sales of about <strong>five rugs</strong>. The literacy class that followed has now met every week for two years without funding, without pay, because the women needed to read what their own business was producing.

Samira Driouch is president of the cooperative, which formed in 2021 in Akrich, in Al Haouz province some 20 kilometres south of Marrakech. Its members had come through IMAGINE workshops run by the High Atlas Foundation. Nationally, more than 80 percent of the rural women who take part in such workshops never learned to read, most having left school at seven or eight.

A family literacy class began in the village around 2022. Outside funding for it ended two years ago. The class did not. The women kept meeting, weekly, unpaid, teaching and being taught, because the carpet business was growing and the arithmetic of it belonged to them.

Time is precious like gold. If you use it well, you will succeed.

The rugs are dyed with plants — madder root, henna, walnut husk — and knotted in patterns the weavers describe as carrying the region's Muslim-Jewish heritage of coexistence. The nearby fruit-tree nursery sits on land donated by Morocco's Jewish community, beside the shrine of Rabbi Raphael Hacohen, where Muslim caretakers have tended the cemetery for generations.

Literacy classes and a Farmer-to-Farmer e-marketing workshop widened the cooperative's reach, sales included online. Driouch measures the change in orders, and in the ability to check them.

The date carries a second weight here. International Literacy Day falls on 8 September, observed since 1967. So does the anniversary of the magnitude 6.8 earthquake that struck Al Haouz at 23:11 in 2023, killing close to 3,000 people and destroying much of the stone-and-mud housing in villages around Akrich. The women who lost neighbours that night still gather in the same room each week, over the same letters.