Volunteer Morocco Mission Statement 

Volunteer Morocco improves the self-sustainability of under-privileged communities and their members in southwest Morocco by improving healthcare access, education, farming technologies, and assisting in the formation of microenterprises. Volunteer Morocco carries out its operations by offering volunteer opportunities to university students as well as others interested in volunteering in Morocco. 

Program Goals

Volunteering in Morocco

1. Gain experience as an International Volunteer within a structured program that focuses on improving health care access, educational access, and improving farming techniques for rural Moroccans. 
2. Learn more about health care delivery, in both urban and rural settings, in the context of developing nations.
3. Cultivate leadership skills and global perspective that prepare participants for future work in NGOs and as health care workers.

Moroccan communities visited by the volunteers

1. Volunteer Morocco develops and encourages economic self-sustainability in the rural village region of Riad Imsouane, with a particular emphasis on the empowerment of women.
2. Volunteer Morocco supports Moroccan Associations and Cooperatives that provide education, healthcare, and sustainable farming to the Agadir-Riad Imsouane region.

Volunteer Morocco organized its first college student trip to the Riad Imsouane villages in the spring of 2007, raising funds to enable students to plant 700 olive trees and bring school supplies for every child in the new school.  Since the first student trip in 2007, Volunteer Morocco has organized five additional student group trips with a health care, health clinic, and educational focus, organized (in cooperation with MCPHS Pre-Med Society) 2 5-K races to support medical equipment shipments, organized first-ever rural health clinics in remote parts of Morocco, and sponsored graduate students from MIT and Brown University to study wind-farm potential and drip irrigation farming potential in the Riad Imsouane region.

VM’s efforts have resulted in $1.5 million in medical supplies pledged to the greater region’s hospitals, delivery of $295,000 worth of medical equipment to Hassan II and surrounding clinics, a PhD thesis research project, an OXFAM study on the potential for wind-farm development on Morocco’s coast, mobilization of Moroccan doctors and pharmacists to participate in rural health clinics to bring first-ever health services to the region, over 1500 trees planted, a community farming project to test the feasibility of using drip irrigation on local crops, and revitalization and financial support for the Riad Imsouane Development Association (the Moroccan version of a community-based non-profit).

 Volunteer Morocco works in close association with the following organizations:

  Riad Imsouane Association (Riad Imsouane, Morocco)

  Friends of Hassan II (Agadir, Morocco)

  Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Heath Sciences (Boston, MA, USA)

  Salem State College ( Salem, MA, USA)

  The Argan Tree (Cambridge, MA, USA)

  Foundation du Sud (Agadir, Morocco)

  Internation Medical Equipment Collaborative (North Andover, MA, USA)