Start of academic year postponed to give time for vaccinations

The start of the next academic year at public and private universities in Morocco has been postponed to 1 October 2021 to ease the move back to contact teaching and learning.

The step will allow time for students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to achieve herd immunity, the ministry of higher education and scientific research said in a statement on 6 September 2021.

The ministry stressed that the postponement is necessary to protect the health of university staff and students to avoid any epidemic setback.

Morocco is vaccinating university students 19 years and older voluntarily, the ministry said in a statement on 3 August 2021.

Elizabeth Buckner, former Fulbright scholar to Morocco and assistant professor of higher education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, Canada, told University World News that universities around the world are struggling with these decisions.

“Each country has to weigh up the risk of public health against the learning lost and inequalities driven by unequal access to online learning opportunities,” she said.

Buckner said that Morocco’s decision to adopt in-person education is in line with what universities around the world are doing. “Right now, wearing masks and doing our best to vaccinate students and faculty is all that we can do.”

Abdellah Benahnia, a part-time international researcher and professor at the Superior Institutions of Science and Technology, an associate college of Cardiff Metropolitan University in Casablanca, said that, “besides in-person learning, this academic year, perhaps, will witness the integration of other aspects of instruction, including distance learning that could be available for unvaccinated students”.

However, there are some obstacles, like the poor financial position of many families in rural and remote areas. “Providing the appropriate tools and necessary awareness among the teaching body and students before introducing a new teaching or learning process is no doubt the key to its success,” he said.

COVID-19 status

By 10 September 2021, Morocco had recorded 896,913 infections and 13,370 COVID-19-related deaths in the country since the pandemic began, which ranks the country second in Africa in terms of infections after South Africa.

Morocco has fully vaccinated about 49% of its population of about 37 million people. The country has administered more vaccine doses per person than the global average, and the highest proportion in Africa, according to Our World in Data.

This follows a comprehensive communication campaign to provide information and reassure and encourage people to get vaccinated, Dr Asmaa Drissi Bourhanbour of the Laboratory of Immunology at the Ibn Rochd University Hospital Centre in Casablanca wrote in a letter to the editor published in the Journal of Travel Medicine in May, 2021.

Learning from experience elsewhere

From an epidemiological point of view, delaying the start of the academic year from September to October to re-implement the in-person education system is a workable decision.

“With nearly 50% of Morocco’s citizens vaccinated that could reach up to 75% among the university community by October, Morocco could achieve herd immunity that is suitable for starting contact education in the new academic year, but universities must stick to COVID-19 universal precautions,” Dr Ifeanyi McWilliams Nsofor, the director of policy and advocacy for Nigeria Health Watch, told University World News.

This is in line with the findings of the October 2020 study titled ‘Vaccine efficacy needed for a COVID-19 coronavirus vaccine to prevent or stop an epidemic as the sole intervention’, which indicated that up to 75% of the population has to be vaccinated with vaccines that “have an efficacy of at least 70% to prevent an epidemic and of at least 80% to largely extinguish an epidemic without any other measures such as social distancing”.

Four COVID-19 vaccines approved in Morocco are the Russian, British, Chinese, and Indian vaccines.

“Several African countries have been conducting in-person education, from which Morocco should learn lessons,” said Nsofor, who is also senior New Voices fellow at the US-based Aspen Institute and senior Atlantic fellow for Health Equity at George Washington University.

For example, Morocco should learn from the Libyan pandemic evaluation system for universities how to determine the readiness of universities and how to take evidence-based decisions about whether to continue or suspend contact learning.

Morocco should also learn from the experience of educational institutions in the Seychelles archipelago off the east coast of Africa that having a high percentage of vaccinated students does not mean that COVID-19 preventive measures can be stopped.