Empowering Moroccan Girls through Education

Women’s empowerment is one of the main goals of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework that is adopted by many developing countries, including Morocco, to fight poverty and gender discrimination. The Fourth and fifth goals in this framework aim at putting gender equality and women’s empowerment on the agenda of education and literacy policy makers by eliminating gender disparity in primary, secondary and tertiary education. To do so, Morocco is committed to build on the partnership opportunities with U.N agencies like Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) to develop a gender-sensitive approach with specific and clear goals that would enable the implementation of gender mainstreaming at all levels and stages of policy making. In doing so, The Moroccan government will not only be able to solve gender-inequalities in different life domains including education, but also develop a policy arsenal that goes in-line with the international goals on gender equality. However, it is argued that the SDGs framework does not serve women’s cause as it serves liberal agendas by shifting the attention from real empowerment of women to integrating them in the economic system, turning them into a ‘new proletariat’. Therefore, this study analyzes the MCC’s gender policy along with Gender and Social Inclusion Dimensions Action Plan (GISAP) using Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis model in the light of Sardenberg’s [31] conceptualization of women’s empowerment and current development approaches to see if the approach that the Moroccan government is adopting is ‘liberating’ girls or fostering ‘liberal’ ideology. Results showed that this approach considers empowerment an instrument for economic growth and a fertile ground for strengthening liberal ideology through a horizontal and narrow interpretation of empowerment. Thus, girls and women should be empowered through a vertically-oriented approach that enhances their participation in policy making, inhibits discriminatory practices and challenges patriarchal structures.