Claus Meyer and Oxfam IBIS will open a new food school in Morocco

A new innovative collaboration between the Melting Pot Foundation and Oxfam IBIS will boost both cooking and job creation in Morocco. An intensive training course will use food crafts to create jobs and opportunities for young people in Morocco, and thereby help thousands out of poverty and marginalisation.

“More than a third of Morocco’s young people are neither in permanent employment nor in education. Therefore, they often end up on the bench without influence, and trapped at the bottom of a very unequal society. With this new collaboration, we create opportunities for young people to get a useful education, an entry ticket to a good and stable job and a chance to live the life they want,” says Trine Pertou Mach, who is political director at Oxfam IBIS.

The new collaboration is part of the Danish-Arab Partnership Programme and consists of creating a short, intensive gastronomic training course of eight weeks, which can help to open doors that are otherwise closed to young Moroccans. The project is made in collaboration between Oxfam IBIS and the Melting Pot Foundation, which Claus Meyer has founded.

1,300 years ago, Morocco was a world centre for, among other things, gastronomy, and the idea is to get the enthusiasm for Moroccan cuisine back to the youth and thereby create new opportunities for young people.

“It is a great honour to be allowed to help others with what you have learned. Our hope is we can use the joy of cooking and the cooking school as a catalyst for job creation. We are very much looking forward to seeing how much wonderful change we can contribute to,” says Claus Meyer.

Previous experiences create new possibilities

This is not the first time that Oxfam IBIS and the Melting Pot Foundation use food to create change. In 2011, they established a food school with a belonging restaurant in La Paz, Bolivia. The project has educated more than 3,000 young people over the years and  created the socio-economic restaurant GUSTU, which was named Bolivia’s best restaurant in 2017 and one of the best in Latin America.

It is the experience of the collaboration that the two organisations will use to give Moroccan young people a helping hand and create excitement about the many possibilities of gastronomy.

Source: Oxfam IBIS (in Danish)