Hello,
I would like to contribute on "Question 3: How best can we achieve gender transformative impacts".
I strongly believe in the power of education and the influence our educational systems can have in making our fight for gender equality feasible. The world is where it is today because of the way we were educated and brought up some years back. Before the second world war, most women never worked because they weren't given the opportunities to do so, until the need arose for women to work in factories and production houses because most of the men who actually were the workforce at that time had gone to war. Since then, the liberation of women has been slow but sure, but we all agree that more needs to be done.
I believe special modules on gender equality should be incorporated in our school systems right from primary school. We shouldn't wait till we get to the university and then start hearing about gender equality. By then, society would have pumped in so many ideologies that make people function in a biased manner uncosciously.
But if we are to start from down up, we will have a whole new generation of people who think differently. Thank you.
Dr. Samuel Opoku Gyamfi
Regional Coordinator - North Africa
CSAYN.
Dr. Samuel Opoku Gyamfi
First of all, the entire country of Morocco was place on lockdown from Mid-March. Presently, the country has gradually started lifting the restrictions by dividing the country into two geographic zones depending on case density per region.
With regards to local food production, I can say that the Moroccan Government put in excellent measures to ensure that there was more than enough adequate supply during the lockdown period. Even during the period of Ramadan, where most households buy more food items, there was enough food for the period. The Moroccan government took hold of the sector, provided incentives to enable food and dairy producers to produce enough quantity of food without compromising on quality.
There were still bottlenecks. This year's overall yield in cereals was very low. The government in response to this, is considering an application to scrape import duties for cereal products since the country is given little choic than to import more cereals.
Other areas like fruits and vegetables actually enjoyed great success. There was enough for the Moroccan market. There is the demand to export fruits to some EU Countries. The only bottleneck was that most of these exports were done by road. The restrictions and the administrative delays in treating some processes may have increased costs of these exported products. It also may have had dire consequences of perishable goods. Allbeit, local prices of food across Morocco was well regulated by the government as it supersvised strictly and applied sanctions to ensure that local retailers did not hike food prices.
In all, the positives of the Moroccan response could serve as best practice that could be emulated by other countries.