Rule of Law: Success Stories
Enhancing Legal Literacy among Women in Morocco
A USAID funded Global Rights program has been promoting human rights awareness among women in Morocco. Through partnership with local NGOs and development associations, Global Rights has worked with thousands of Moroccan women to improve their legal literacy and successfully demand that their rights are respected.
Since the late 1980s, many women's advocacy organizations and local development associations have emerged in Morocco to combat violence against women, gender-based legal and cultural discrimination, under-representation of women in government and the economic sector, and illiteracy. While the majority of Moroccan women's advocacy NGOs are concentrated in the urban centers of Rabat and Casablanca, women's and development organizations have emerged in smaller cities and towns across the country since the late 1990's to address problems unique to women in their regions. The 2003 announcement of landmark reforms to the personal status code ("Mudawana") have come after years of advocacy for women's greater rights on matters covering marriage and divorce.
Yet, despite improved legislation, procedural obstacles in legal proceedings in cases involving women's rights are often insurmountable. Cultural norms, tradition, high illiteracy rates, and lack of knowledge of their legal rights may prevent women from invoking their rights or reporting crimes against them, such as rape, child abuse, sexual exploitation and domestic violence.
With support from USAID, Global Rights opened its office in Rabat, Morocco in March 2000. The Morocco team convened a Legal Literacy Working Group comprised of fifteen women's advocacy groups and local development associations in order to create a comprehensive program manual on women's human and legal rights. Their collective efforts resulted in a training module with 74 parts (or sessions) and the production of a 420-page Arabic language legal literacy manual, first published in February 2002, entitled "Making Human Rights Real: A Human Rights Education Program for Women in Morocco."
The diverse topics addressed in the program include introductory sessions on women's human rights concepts and the legal sources of human rights, as well as specific subjects such as women's rights in the family, the right to freedom from violence, and the right to work, education, property, health, and to participation in public life. An updated manual completed in 2004 adds subjects such as the right to development, the impact of terrorism on women's human rights, and the rights of physically challenged women. The new Manual also has an Arabic-Berber human rights dictionary, and updated legal reference materials that include the reforms made to the Moroccan Personal Status Laws in February 2004.
Following publication of the first version of the Manual in February 2002, Global Rights held an intensive series of training workshops titled, "Facilitating for Women's Human Rights Education," for 90 facilitators from six regions in Morocco. The goal was to train them to use the materials and to become women's human rights facilitators for groups of illiterate and semi-literate women. Once trained, the facilitators implemented pilot human rights education programs for thousands of women across the country.
Moroccan partners in the program often commented on how novel the topic of legal literacy has been - in the past, topics of rights and laws were seen as inaccessible because they required vast legal expertise. As one participant in a program remarked in a recent evaluation, "Women who have not been to school would have never dreamed of talking about the law. They feel it is like catching up or being compensated for studies they did not do."
These efforts have produced concrete improvements in the lives of women in rural and para-rural areas, with many participants noting that the women who have participated in the initiative are now:
- Demanding marriage contracts for their daughters;
- Enrolling in traditional vocational training classes where they are asking for sessions on business and law;
- Registering their children with local authorities to obtain benefits, even when registration by single women can lead to ostracism and harassment;
- Expressing opinions on matters they would not otherwise feel entitled of competent to discuss; and
- Organizing support groups for women victims of violence.
Global Rights' Liaison, Khadija Belhouss, reported that she now has more of the marginalized enrolled in her program, as well as disadvantaged housewives and young people. In the recent past, this was considered unthinkable in her community because of the stigma attached to marginalized populations. She is convinced that awareness of women's rights conveyed by the program triggered a general change in both perception and attitude within the community.
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