Moroccan Charity Empowers Single Mothers with Housing and Job Training

Mainly coming to seek refuge at the Association, single mothers are welcomed by social workers who are present to offer advice, assistance and listening. They start by taking care of basic needs such as housing, food, health, before proposing a support program adapted to the profile of each woman, reports HuffPost.

Workshops on income-generating activities and personal development are offered to the recruits, in order to "allow the woman to regain her footing, to accept herself again and to accept others". A way to reconcile the single mother with her body and the outside world.

Outraged by the attitude of society towards this social group, the head of the Social Pole within the Association, Sara Lamjamri, declares to HuffPost: "A single mother is first and foremost a mother deprived of her rights. All single mothers, whether within the walls of our association or outside, are women who fight daily against a society which, when it comes to an out-of-wedlock relationship, often takes the side of the man and only judges the woman".

Declared outlaw by society, the single mother is subject to religious and social laws, accepting, against her will, to be banished from her environment and to be deprived of the right to register her child in the civil registry, to administer vaccines to him or to enroll him in a school.

Lamjamri adds that the child and his mother become "phantom citizens". "Therefore, if a single mother tries to assert her rights, she has no choice but to go through an association," she specifies. Several women who have experienced the association are happy to have regained a social status, through their reintegration into the professional sector, and the registration of their children in the civil registry.