The story of four bright high schoolers who were not supported to participate in the International Olympiad of Informatics.

 

The Moroccan Ministry of Education never refrains from surprising us, in a deplorable way. Today’s news has shutdown the year long work and preparations made by high schoolers, enthusiastic mentors and organisers of the Moroccan Olympiads in Informatics (MOI) – we will get back to that later – that involved getting 4 high school students to represent Morocco in the International Olympiads of Informatics (later supervised by the ministry itself). Today, we have four smart, passionate students ready for the event, sounds fantastic right? Well don’t get too excited:

A private source has directly informed us that the moroccan ministry of education will not be funding the 4 Moroccan representatives in the IOI finals in Tehran, Iran.

The odd thing is that the ministry supervised the contest back in january after they had posted a memo providing all the details, dates, phases and the IOI location. Little did we know, they run off and abandon the high-schoolers AND the MOI organisers, which could be interpreted as a way of putting the funding responsibility to, well, nobody.

Fact:
Morocco is eligible to participate in the IOI2017 finals for the first time in history. Not attending however would strip the eligibility for good.

This only goes to show that the Ministry of Education is the brick wall stopping all enthusiasts from achieving their goals, dreams, and being proud representatives of our country. Instead of being cooperative and ready for action to facilitate access to any international contests / events.

A previous article showcased how bad the organizing process has been, however it got better couple weeks after the article had dropped. And the efforts made my MOI organisers and especially Anas Abou El Kalam have been noticed quite significantly.

“I’m so demotivated, like I prepared for this instead of Bac, to do nothing. Anas is an amazing person, he fought with us and stood by our side. The organisers paid for our accelerated course camp in Marrakech, the ministry did nothing at all (euphemism)”

Despite this huge letdown, some people are in fact looking into the situation to sort out the required funds for the flight tickets and participants presence. The estimated amount is roughly 30.000 MAD.
In conclusion, I personally hope that people and more social media groups feel for this deplorable issue, spread the word, and maybe contribute so as not to let all those efforts go in vain.