UAE’s Zayed Sustainability Prize inspires students to transform water-scare school into oasis of hope in Morocco

UAE’s Zayed Sustainability Prize inspires students to transform water-scare school into oasis of hope in Morocco

Abu Dhabi: The Zayed Sustainability Prize – the UAE’s global award for recognising excellence in sustainability – helped motivate students at Al Amal Junior High School in Morocco to develop a reliable source of clean drinking water and self-sustaining irrigation system for their educational school garden. “We used to drink from a well connected to the school, but shared it with the local community, so the school suffered shortages, especially in summer. Sometimes we would go a whole day without finding water to drink,” said Ilham Qouissem, one of the students at Al Amal who participated in submitting the proposal that won the Global High Schools 2020 Zayed Sustainability Prize in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Al Amal Junior High School, a rural boarding school located in the small town of Sidi Boubker, in Rehamna province of Morocco, is one of the few regional schools with an academic focus on agriculture. The school’s garden is a living laboratory used for academic enrichment, offering the chance to grow plants, make observations and conduct experiments. However, the water shortages negatively impacted the garden. During summer, plants died due to lack of water, leaving an empty plot of land and