Spotlight on DARNA, Morocco
June 2005. In Morocco, CIRCLE partner DARNA is working with one of the most difficult target groups among child labourers: street children. They have no stable homes, support themselves by begging, petty trade, or crime, and often sniff glue. Many have never gone to school or participated in any organized program with adult leadership. Despite the many challenges related to this target group, DARNA has been able to help many youths with its exceptional pedagogy and integrated approaches. With CIRCLE, they are building a proactive and positive community of street-boys-turned-farm-students. Their strategy includes providing basic education, useful job skills, and psychosocial rehabilitation.
Off the Streets, Into Learning. The students all "own" the DARNA/CIRCLE farm: they are free to come and go, to paint the walls if they like, and to participate in all activities.
In return, they maintain the place. Over the summer holidays, the boys assist with tidying, cleaning and repairs to the farm. They are treated with respect – a new experience for most of them – and in return they are expected to treat others honorably. Upon arrival at the farm, each boy signs a contract with DARNA that sets down this mutual agreement.
All instruction – from literacy to technical training – is practice-oriented, participative, and based on the students' daily life. These boys are learning to write and read about issues that concern them. At the same time, the curriculum raises their awareness about child labor, human rights, and citizenship. The method is very effective: several boys whose real-life struggles had left them impatient to sit and learn in a formal classroom, and thus had dropped out of school, learned to read and write in a couple of months with DARNA.
The on-farm training focuses on entire chains: from the production of primary goods, through their transformation and processing, and on to the commercialization of final products. Students interested in goats, for example, learn not only how to herd them, but how to care for and breed them, milk them, and make and market cheese from their milk. The same applies to various other products: ducks (pâté), fruits (juices, jelly), and others. The boys learn marketing and sales by working with DARNA's shop and restaurant in Tangier: the farm provides cheese to the restaurant and Maison des Jeunes, and the latter sends bread every day from its bakery.
The former street children are also participating in the management of the farm: once or twice a week, they meet and have the opportunity to mention any problems and work on a solution. The students are thus not only heard, but made accountable (at least in part) for their own training and farm life.
Most importantly perhaps, the students are able after some time to regain self-respect and to define a future for themselves. DARNA issues membership cards to youth who prove their engagement with the learning farm. The cards do not only have a practical value (in case of any trouble outside the farm, police or doctors know who to contact), but they are perceived by the members as part of their identity. Most of these children have never had an identity card – or even a birth certificate – and the DARNA card is the first written proof that they “exist.”
Mini-Spotlight: One day at the farm, DARNA's chairwoman and a group of students discovered a radio that looked like a bomb. The mechanism inside had all the necessary elements. Upon questioning, some of the boys admitted that men they didn't really know had given them the parts. The men had also explained how to put the parts together to build the “radio bomb.” DARNA staff immediately understood that the boys had been manipulated by a known criminal network whose members sought to “train” vulnerable youth to make and detonate bombs.
The DARNA team reported the event to the police, and the boys in question continued their studies. One of them has since graduated and currently works in a bakery shop; he is also a member of a neighbourhood association. He recently contacted the farm to propose a visit with a couple of youths from his association, to show them an alternative to child labour.
Instead of having fallen in with the criminal network, this young man has become a true citizen who now also contributes to the fight against child labour.
The DARNA team reported the event to the police, and the boys in question continued their studies. One of them has since graduated and currently works in a bakery shop; he is also a member of a neighbourhood association. He recently contacted the farm to propose a visit with a couple of youths from his association, to show them an alternative to child labour.
Instead of having fallen in with the criminal network, this young man has become a true citizen who now also contributes to the fight against child labour.