Cooking for a cause

According to the World Bank, women make up only 26 per cent of the workforce in Morocco. Overall unemployment figures for the country stand at around 9 per cent. “It’s been fantastic on that level, to create these jobs,” she adds.

Smaller spin-off projects include the Sign Language café, which employs two of Amal’s former apprentices who are deaf – and was funded by part of a $15,000 donation from the IMF, following a visit from Christine Lagarde to Amal in 2018 – and the newer Amal 21, a café that employs seven women with Down syndrome. Both ideas came from people working within the organisation, says Belahcen. “Amal is not only empowering our trainees, but also our staff to carry an idea through. It’s not a top-down thing.”

Amal today is a well-known cog of Marrakesh life; but it started small. Belahcen traces it back to a chance encounter she had with a woman begging on the street in 2006. “This woman had a light in her face,” she recalls. “There was something that called upon me to engage with her. Her kids were hungry; she didn’t have any money to buy milk. We had kids the same age. There was no choice but to act.”

For several years, Belahcen raised money and donated directly to a growing group of needy women. “It was very much the old model of charity,” she says. “I wasn’t aware there was another way to do it, or that I was capable of it.”

The change came after a trip to the pioneering Association Soldarité Féminine, an established nonprofit founded in 1985 that trained single mothers in its Casablanca restaurant. It inspired Belahcen to pivot her approach, beginning with a small-scale initiative to teach needy women how to make and sell baked goods. Its success gave Belahcen the confidence to launch Amal in 2013.

“That was a huge step for me,” she says. “At one point, we had $40 in the bank account. I remember thinking, if we could just get enough customers to pay these women their day’s labour, there was hope.”

Startup costs reached around $40,000, of which Nora managed to fundraise $30,000 through contacts. But the turning point came when the Swiss foundation Drosos swept in six months into the project with seed funding and, as importantly, strategic acumen.

“Not only did we have their financial support,” she says, “but at the time, I had this very nebulous idea of a project related to food that helped women. Drosos made it much more specific: how many women do you want to train? What are your human resource and equipment needs? What are your KPIs? It went from this project that was guided purely by my intuition, to something institutionalised.”

Drosos helped to fund the restaurant for three years (it broke even after the first year), and has since helped to support the catering company as part of a second three-year partnership. With the latter growing at a steady clip, Nora feels that Amal is poised to expand even further.

“We’re thinking of setting up a new division to spearhead new projects,” she says, “and also to better monitor existing projects. We want to know: are the skills we’re teaching these women what they need for the labour market? Is there something else that we need to be doing? How long are they staying in their jobs?”

The ripples of empowering Amal’s women fan far and wide, with some of the women now able to free themselves from abusive partners on whom they were dependent financially. Similarly, having an income allows many of the single mothers to continue to care for their children. “Their mother is going to school, therefore they will go to school,” she says. “There are a lot of positive models there.”

Not every trainee will stay on track. And Nora learned a tough lesson early on when, after five years of trying, she was unable to help the woman she met on the street that day. “She didn’t want the life that I’d imagined for her,” she says. “I realised that you can’t want something more for somebody than they want it themselves.”

But as societal norms start to shift, so does Morocco’s development landscape, which is gradually moving towards a more sustainable model. “There is a currently a transition from development 1.0 in Morocco,” says Nora, “which is trying to help people financially, to training people and having social enterprises.”

Nora sees nonprofits as being a key part of that change. “They have fewer constraints than the private sector,” she adds, “so they can be more innovative. They can be key in working with both the government and private sector to drive development.”

Despite having no previous experience in development work, Nora has managed to grow her idea into a thriving, noisy, steaming reality.

“A restaurant is difficult to run,” she laughs, “and development work is also challenging. On paper, it shouldn’t work.”

And yet, the people keep coming. “Good things attract good things,” she says. “Amal means hope. And you really get that sense – that the future is going to be better than the past.” — PA