At the end of the first official meeting with the Regional Office for Education and Training of Rabat-Sale-Kenitra, the USAID team left not only with a strong partner, but a promise for sustainability.

During the meeting, the Office Management Team announced that the Academy Director, Mr. Mohamed Aderdour, has created a new and permanent unit within the Pedagogical Affairs Division exclusively dedicated to the USAID Reading for Success – National Program for Reading activity. Ms. Errahmani, assigned to head this unit, expressed her enthusiasm and optimism on this promising endeavor.     As Unit Head, she will lead the implementation of the program throughout the region, thereby facilitating a successful scale-up and mobilization of key stakeholders to implement the new reading approach in the region’s primary schools.

The announcement is the first of its kind for USAID in Morocco. USAID has proudly partnered with the Moroccan Ministry of National Education since the 90’s. Establishing this new unit specifically for the National Program for Reading is one more step towards strengthening the partnership between the project and the Academy, and for ensuring a coherent and sustainable implementation of the new early grade reading methodology across the country.

“We are very honored to partner with USAID to improve the quality of reading in our schools,” stated Ms. Errahmani. “This scale-up comes at the right time. Many teachers claim they want to have the same training as their peers in the rest of the region and use the same new reading methods.”

USAID’s Reading for Success – National Program for Reading builds on the data, evidence, and lessons learned from the 30-month Small-Scale Experimentation activity, which developed and tested the most effective approaches in teaching Arabic reading skills to students in targeted primary schools. In close partnership with the Ministry of National Education, the National Program for Reading activity aims to support the Government of Morocco’s efforts to improve students’ reading and writing competencies by expanding the approach to all grade 1-4 classrooms across the country.