ABRID PATH / Morocco

Bahada Khalil / Malika Bourrich

Get in Touch : https://www.instagram.com/abrid_path/

Abrid is a social innovation project designed to amplify the integration of rural cooperatives into the digital world. The word Abrid, meaning “path” in Amazigh, symbolizes the journey toward visibility, autonomy, and economic sustainability for local producers is dedicated to supporting local cooperatives in Agdez that face challenges in selling their products. Our mission is to empower these cooperatives by enhancing their branding and marketing strategies to ensure their sustainability and growth, through storytelling and effective outreach, Abrid connects the unique products of these cooperatives with the right audience.

Local cooperatives in the region do not have enough equipment or expertise to promote their locally grown products and reach out more clients beyond their reach. That’s the reason, we have developed this project to support the local cooperatives to tackle with this challenge while increasing their revenues and creating a system that can benefit both the local community and the businesses.

Firstly, we have visited the local cooperatives to see what products they are making and we implemented small market research to understand their needs, products, demographics of the workers. We have as well as collaborated with the cooperatives in the south of Morocco to increase our outreach. After that, we have implemented our first workshop on “Digital Marketing and Branding” for the women cooperatives and introduced them the e-commerce systems to sell their products while promoting our project.

After that workshop, we still continue on the implementation on the collective data, we have developed a criteria to choose the relative cooperatives by using the criteria as they produce certificated goods, they are involved in the region and sell locally grown products. After the identification of the cooperatives, We have launched our website as a prototype to promote the first launch of our activities.

We have launched the first product as “dried dates” to promote the healthy consumption of sugar. Now, we are continuing to promote these product and we require additional funding to continue our work.  We have tried to reach out the funding organizations, and we are trying to gain a status as a cooperative or enterprise to be able to apply in fundings or receive no-interest credits. In addition to that, we are participating in competitions and events to receive funding.

In the implementation of the project, main problem was lots of cooperatives lack the certification of the health care documents or the qualification labels for health permits. We are trying to manage this challenge to narrow the criteria as we cannot sell any product without a qualification label to ensure the safety.

Within the project; we have reached 141 people through the workshops and we have been cooperating with 10 cooperatives in our region to promote their products and we are trying to extend the process to the other regions as well as secure additional funding to continue and expand our project activities.