Fatiha Tibari always liked learning. As a child in the 1960s, she was studious, she says, and “always at the top of the class” in her school in Casablanca, Morocco’s biggest port city.
But her parents decided to take her out of school before she could finish her primary education after a blow to the head left her with memory problems.
Stuck at home, Fatiha started to study the ways her mom made couscous – a type of pasta – from durum wheat.
“It became a passion for me,” she says. “I need to feel active. I’m not one to sit around doing nothing.”
After she got married, Fatiha kept honing her craft while raising her kids. But it wasn’t until 2013 that she finally took the leap into selling her couscous and growing her own ingredients.
“I wanted to specialize in growing semolina, boulboula and everything related to couscous,” she says. She ultimately formed a cooperative, Nissae Lbssasla, with five women from her community.
They soon started selling in small markets in Casablanca and nearby Berrechid. But running the cooperative was a challenge at first.
“There was no real organization,” she recalls, and none of them had any training in quality control.
A big problem was the well water they were using. “The water tests were bad”, she recalls.
They ultimately found solutions through the National Office of Agricultural Advice and FAO, who offered workshops in entrepreneurship. “We learned to develop the cooperative [and] how to improve the quality of our products,” she says. “We installed a filter which made it possible to improve the water quality and receive our food-safety certificate.”
Since the vast majority of water resources in Morocco go to agriculture, doing more with less was another key part of her training.
“I learned how to use water sparingly and some techniques to get quality crops.”
Today, Fatiha dreams big. “My dream is for this cooperative to become known in Morocco and for our products to be exported elsewhere in the world.”
