Morocco is committed to improving its basic education system, though it continues to have a large population of uneducated, unemployed and underemployed youth. The high rate of middle school dropouts—47 percent leave before graduating—has become a critical concern of the Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training.

Creative’s Improving Training for Quality Advancement in National Education project supports Morocco’s Education Ministry in improving teachers’ pedagogical practice, preventing middle school dropouts and developing innovative and practical teacher training materials for nationwide use. It is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development.

In its nearly five years, the project delivered in-service professional development to more than 3,000 teachers. Meanwhile, more than 4,400 newly recruited teacher trainers received pre-service coursework.

Creative worked with the Education Ministry to update 12 middle school teacher training modules, integrating e-learning into some of these modules and extending the scope of training to in-service as well as pre-service teachers.

Creative partnered with the International Youth Foundation to introduce Life Skills Clubs into the after-school offerings of more than 95 percent of middle schools in the two regions. More than 650 teachers were trained to deliver the Life Skills curriculum, and the clubs reached nearly 10,500 students. Participating students tripled their scores on a test of employability skills, while a control group improved their skills by only a few percentage points.

Youth Speak, a youth-led research activity, engaged young people in an open dialogue about the causes for dropout and the possible solutions to the problem.

Through these and other factors, the dropout rate saw an 18.77 percent decrease nationally and a 44.23 percent decrease in the project’s two target regions (Doukkala-Abda and Fes-Boulmane).