The Rotary Club in Essaouira has just begun a new phase in its socio-cultural actions by directing its activities towards the most basic needs of schoolchildren in rural areas. This universal organisation, recently established in Essaouira, is trying to focus on the priorities of social work, while drawing the attention of decision-makers and various social and political actors to the situation of precariousness that constitutes the daily lot of several rural communes that are isolated and disadvantaged by the poverty map and other programmes targeting priority social zones.

The action was as symbolic as could be, but it found its strength in the collective involvement of the various stakeholders: the rural commune of Sidi Ahmed Essayah, the Rotary Club in Essaouira, and the Second Souffle Association, which brings together students from the Institute of Business and Management of Montpellier, with a programme of games and educational activities, and the distribution of supplies to 200 schoolgirls and schoolboys.

"We want to start a new phase in the social work of the Rotary Club in Essaouira. Admittedly, our intervention cannot satisfy all needs, but we are still trying to contribute positively to the national fight against indicators of precariousness, while mobilising and directing the interest of the various stakeholders towards the real priorities of the rural people of Essaouira," declared Mustapha Belasri, current president of the Rotary Club in Essaouira.

Clément Fabregot, Romain Courgoet, Nicole Faby, Bénédicte Pons, and Charlotte Rigawd are the five French students who initiated this dynamic at the Institute of Business and Management Sciences in Montpellier. Five enthusiastic and committed young people who display the ambition to mobilise more young French people around the social cause that was at the origin of the creation of the Second Souffle Association just two months before the action in Sidi Ahmed Essayah.

They declare themselves satisfied with the results achieved by this socio-educational action, which brought smiles to the children. The rural commune of Sidi Ahmed Essayeh, located in the circle of Tamanar and composed of 11 Douars, is one of the few communes in the province excluded from the national human development programme guided by the poverty map, which included neighbouring communes that nevertheless have the same socio-economic specificities.

The eleven Douars of this commune, which has a magnificent 23 km coastline and a large argan forest area, are still deprived of drinking water. The Ismail Douar has not benefited from the rural electrification programme like the other Douars of the commune.

Road infrastructure is lacking in this isolated rural commune; the road connecting the centre of the commune to Tafedna has still not been completed, which accentuates the social and economic exclusion suffered by this region, whose eight thousand inhabitants are forced at the end of each month, for lack of ONE agencies, to travel to Tamanar to pay their bills or recharge their consumption cards.

A trip that costs on average two hundred dirhams, while the amount paid or recharged barely exceeds one hundred dirhams!