Clean Drinking Water for 1250 Villagers in Morocco

9 October 2024: Abu Dhabi, UAE: The Zayed Sustainability Prize, the UAE’s pioneering award for innovative solutions to global challenges, has announced this year's finalists following a deliberation by its esteemed Jury.

The winners will be announced at the Zayed Sustainability Prize Awards Ceremony on 14 January 2025 as part of Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week. The Zayed Sustainability Prize’s Jury elected the 33 finalists from 5,980 entries received across six categories: Health, Food, Energy, Water, Climate Action and Global High Schools.

The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) has been selected among the top candidates for the Zayed Sustainability Prize - Water category. The solutions proposed by the final candidates aim to improve water use efficiency and enhance access to clean drinking water. The finalists for this category included:

• Elman Teknoloji Ltd, an SME from Türkiye that employs sensors to optimise water use in irrigation and agriculture, cutting labour costs by 80%.
• HAF, an NPO from Morocco that provides a solar powered water pumping system to optimise groundwater extraction.
• SkyJuice Foundation Inc., an NPO from Australia that develops low-cost, easy to deploy water filters that provide clean drinking water without the need for chemicals, pumps, or external energy sources.

HAF considers clean water a top priority in its development strategy, impacting health, education, agriculture, and beyond. Access to clean drinking water for every person is essential. Providing access to clean drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene investments helps prevent waterborne diseases.

HAF designs water projects tailored to each community's needs and collaborates with various stakeholders to find solutions using local building practices, transferring necessary technical skills for water system maintenance. Moreover, clean water significantly affects health and well-being in communities. By accessing new water sources, building water containment and delivery systems, we can expand agricultural production in drought-prone areas.

Morocco's agricultural sector is the largest consumer of water resources, surpassing domestic use by far. Factors like persistent drought, the need for water infrastructure and landscape management adaptation, soil degradation, and low rainfall exacerbate the need for well-designed irrigation systems, especially in mountainous regions.

Improved irrigation systems provide a pathway to renew land using traditional farming methods, improving soil quality and expanding production. HAF's efforts focus on innovative solutions to mitigate these challenges by contributing to community empowerment and participatory planning, restructuring irrigation systems, building irrigation basins, storing irrigation water, and enhancing access to potable water.

The winners of the 2025 Zayed Sustainability Prize will be announced at the awards ceremony during Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week on January 14, 2025. Each winner in the categories of health, food, energy, water, and climate action will receive one million US dollars, while each winning school from the six Global High Schools will receive up to 150,000 US dollars.

Water is necessary for life. This is a simple fact that most people learn in primary school and inherently know long before that. It is literally a life-giving substance. But in the Moroccan landscape, there is a distinct lack of this essential chemical compound. This is not a byproduct of the ever-present Orientalist stereotype about the desert but rather a direct result of climate change and the increasingly severe droughts which this international phenomenon is bringing. There are doubtless countless studies and a plethora of scientific facts to describe the drought which dominates the landscape and which has indelibly shaped the livelihoods of Moroccans. But ultimately what I have found to be more poignant is simple observation. 

It is not just that the landscape is dry, nor is it just that it is devoid of the vegetation one might expect further north in Morocco. Rather, what becomes clear in driving in the expansive and diverse region between Khenifra and Azilal and Tiznit is that the inhabitants of this land are being forced into a fundamental shift in their livelihoods, a shift which demands increasingly resilient plants that thrive in desert-like conditions and require very little water. What becomes clear is that the livelihood that is being so fundamentally altered by these increasingly dire conditions is, in fact, not entirely a livelihood that is endemic to Morocco but is instead a livelihood which is implicitly connected to the rise of cash crop agriculture and the intrusion of capitalism and commercialism into this nation. And it is all the result of environmental trends which have conspired to target regions like Morocco which are exceptionally dependent upon unsustainable structures imposed by “expert” outsiders. 

Morocco has a long tradition of widely diverse agriculture, a tradition which emphasizes and applauds biodiversity and the diversification of profit sources. For example, Amina, HAF’s tree planting program director, explained that her father and his family have long planted a huge array of crops ranging from grains such as barley and wheat to fruits such as fig and nuts such as walnuts all in addition to raising some livestock. However, many Moroccan farmers within the past few decades moved away from this endemic agricultural lifestyle and embraced cash crops. Wheat, barely, alfalfa — all crops which are associated with the recent rise of cash crop agriculture — are no longer sustainable or even remotely profitable in many regions because there is simply not enough water to support these crops. So these farmers are having to re-embrace the sort of biodiversity which encapsulates more tree-based agriculture and specifically trees that are exceptionally resilient and that, in their mature form, require less water than traditional cash crops. 

And yet even with this newfound agricultural shift, the landscape in many places is still so strikingly barren. There are the trees which are supposed to be the future of Morocco, but they have long since died from a lack of water. There are fields and fields of untapped land because there is no nearby water source. And even where there is green and growth, this outward appearance often obscures the daily struggle to find sufficient amounts of water. It seems, sometimes in my very limited experience, that it is not just cash crops which are becoming increasingly obsolete in a changing environment, but that sometimes farming itself is becoming impossible.But this quite literally cannot be the future for which we settle because a lack of one life-giving substance — water — is endangering another life-giving substance — food.  

And while agriculture is perhaps a potent example of the water shortage, it is by no means the only example. Consider that the cost of sheep for Eid has gone up by nearly 1,000 dirham across much of the nation. For me, this is perhaps the truly striking nature of the water shortage — this shortage has touched every aspect of Moroccan life, from the work that is done to religious traditions. It is easy to take for granted substances like water which are so basic in our ability to survive. It is so easy to start forgetting how these “guarantees” have shaped the way we live and with what assumptions we approach life. But when they begin to be taken away, as in Morocco, what is left, hopefully, is not the remnants of a culture but rather a clear and contemporary picture of how cultures adapt.