Before the Moroccan government banned the production, sale, import and distribution of single-use plastic bags in 2015, the country was its second largest consumer after the United State, running through three billion of them each year. Long before then, starting in 2006, Faiza Hajji had already found a way to turn this chronic waste challenge into functional items of beauty at her atelier, Ifassen.

There’s a neighbourhood in Berkane, a town in northeastern Morocco, that’s nicknamed “The Plastic Village.” As far as the eyes can see, the land is covered in dusty, used plastic bags of different colours. It is an odd, albeit ominous, kind of flower field, a symbol of how pervasive and significant a threat these objects are to our environment. With a voice warm, and laced with occasional laughter, Faiza Hajji, narrates how this neighbourhood, what to do with its pollutants and a simple gesture of gratitude encouraged her to try out for a competition that birthed her company, Ifassen, more than a decade ago.

Hajji ’s mother, the first female doctor in the northeastern region, was an obstetric gynaecologist who introduced the use of ultrasound technology in the region. She consulted with and attended to many pregnant women, many of them often unable to pay for her services. 

“And one day, one of my mum’s patients gave her a basket of bread to thank her,” Hajji tells AMAKA. “The bread basket was woven from grass fibre and biscuit wrappers. And when I saw that, I thought, maybe we can use [all that] plastic to make the same,” she said, in reference to the neighbourhood overrun by plastic bags. .

Years later, Hajji had moved to France to study at the Télécom Bretagne. Her mother did not want her to become a medical doctor, so she chose engineering instead, in line with her late father’s career path. The telecommunications industry in Morocco was just blossoming at the time and so she sought to obtain a degree in telecommunications engineering. Hajji was also involved in non-academic students associations, and went on to found a local chapter of the Erasmus Student Network (ESN) to support foreign students who had come to study in France.

“Because of this, I was in contact with the international relations department of the school and this is how I saw that there was a contest for students who had some kind of idea abroad,” she says. 

The contest was organised by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Bretagne, a northwestern peninsula of France. Hajji applied. Her idea was simple: gather discarded plastic bags polluting places like The Plastic Village and have craftswomen weave beautiful bags and accessories from it. She would then help them sell the items they created “so that they can at least pay for their medical bills and consultations, and provide for their basic needs.” Her idea won first prize. It wasn't just the prize money (EUR5000), an amount she considered at the time was quite substantial, that surprised or encouraged her, but that the panel of established businesspersons believed in the idea.

Alongside finishing her degree, Hajji began developing the idea into a business. She secured a job at Accenture, a finance and telecoms consultancy company after graduation but did not find fulfilment there despite the fact that it paid well. 

“I started looking into microfinance,” she says. It wasn’t long before she resigned from that job and went to work for a microfinance non-governmental organisation in Mexico. Ifassen, which means ‘hands’ in Tamazight (The language spoken by the Amazigh or Berber people), grew alongside this career switch. 

Business operations and model

Morocco is home to transgenerational craftswomen who have handmade rugs, baskets and other decorative or wearable pieces from natural resources for centuries. Take the Amazigh, a culturally rich group of people spread across parts of North Africa (about 40 percent of the population in Morocco are Amazigh) and whose handicrafts have persevered. Iconic Moroccan rugs are handwoven by Amazigh women who work in collectives shearing sheep for wool, washing and making them into yarns, dyeing them with plants like rosemary and pomegranates, and weaving their history and culture into its patterns.

Ifassen’s craftswomen, mostly settled in rural areas in Morocco, also work in collectives of 10-to-20 women, often delivering different production demands in the chain leading up to the finished products. Hajji and her team collect plastic bags that are delivered to the women who then scour the fields for halfah, a durable plant fibre found in two species of perennial grasses that grow in Western Mediterranean countries. The plant fibres are soaked in water, worked a bit on stone and then dried before they are fit for use. Because it is important to maintain cultural family dynamics that require these women to stay home and tend to their families, their homes serve as private ateliers where they work at their own pace and can fit in raising their children, homemaking, gardening or animal rearing into their crafts work. Most of the women are unable to read and write. Hajji founded a subsidiary non-governmental arm, Association du Doctor Fatiha (ADF), named after her mother, and through this platform, the women are taught how to account for their time and labour when fixing prices, ensuring quality control and the process it takes to create designs that appeal to customers. After the bags are made, Ifassen buys the items from the women which they in turn sell via an online commerce platform but also in physical markets with a profit margin added.

Hajji explains the company partners and collaborates with brands and stores to develop their own designs while employing Ifassen’s philosophies of empowering rural craftswomen, eco-design and environmental sustainability. There have also been art-focused partnerships with museums for exhibitions.

“We’ve had the chance to work with a Moroccan architect who had an exhibition in Denmark,” Hajji says. “We developed seats for her and we made them with plastic bags, using local carpet weaving techniques.”

“Another museum in France [the Musée du Quai Branly] saw that and reached out. We met with them, the seats were not appropriate for them so we developed another project with the same weaving patterns using flour bags,” she adds.  

Environmental impact

Hajji says Ifassen has taken more than 52,000 plastic bags off the streets of Berkane and incorporated them into a variety of products since 2006. Indirectly, Ifassen has been contributing to both local and global advocacy in the conversations around sustainability both with the Moroccan Ministry of Environment and organisations like the United Nations, World Bank and European Union.

When the country’s ban on plastic bags came into effect in 2016, it marked a substantial effort by the government to tackle the problem of plastic pollution and move it towards its goals of going green. Hajji says the impact of the law has had varying degrees of success across the country. Three years ago, findings from a study involving Ifassen uncovered that while adoption had been significant in commercial outfits in big city centres, in smaller cities, there was a plastic bag black market with many citing a lack of alternatives. “If the market sellers don’t give plastic bags, we were told they lose their customers to those who give,” says Hajji.

In 2020, before the global pandemic brought things to a standstill, with the aid of donor organisations, Ifassen took its women to task to make reusable shopping bags to serve these traders. With marketing and free distribution, traders were encouraged to offer discounts to their customers who returned with the bags while they themselves committed to not buying single-use plastic bags during the period for which they would receive the Ifassen shopping bags at no cost. Interestingly, Hajji says, more women customers were found to return with the reusable shopping bags than men. 

Hajji says she believes women are key to unlocking solutions to the environmental challenges the world faces today. Women are naturally more connected to nature and the environment, maybe more willing to nurture, she argues. One of the sectors where this has been evident around the world is in the microfinance industry where she says, from experience, in group lending arrangements, it is often the case that groups comprise at least 50 percent of women if the loans are to be repaid. 

“I think women have this responsibility and they also have this gift of being more connected to the environment. So, I think maybe the answer will come through women,” she says. 

Today, Hajji no longer works in the telecoms industry or microfinance sector, and has gone full circle back into the healthcare industry her mother did not want her to be a part of. She now works as a holistic therapist specialising in microbiome health. Using DNA sequencing, Hajji maps the microbiome makeup of her clients and with the results can provide solutions like dietary changes, sleep recommendations, stress management or dietary supplementation with appropriate probiotics. We are all interconnected; with nature, with the environment, with microscopic life or animal and plant life and they can and do impact both mental and physical health. 

Looking to the future

Hajji has run Ifassen from everywhere but Morocco. She has called this both a weakness and strength given that putting a spatial distance between herself and the bureaucracies or dispiriting politics of her home country has contributed to Ifassen’s longevity. Having the right local team has, therefore, been very critical but also has flexibility and being able to adapt to the demands of the present without losing the core values and vision of the business.

“I’ve learnt in the past 15 years to listen,” she says.

Post-pandemic, Hajji says Ifassen is looking to have the women become more independent in producing items end-to-end. She is also looking to continue a circular programme Ifassen began with university students in Morocco to give them opportunities to provide practical solutions to environmental challenges like plastic pollution in communities around Morocco.

More collaboration is also ahead, she says, to turn Ifassen into an incubator of small projects that bring together environmental protection, eco-design and empowering women.