Hello there and welcome to Moroccan Roundup where we take a look at what is happening up and down Morocco.
This week we have an international win for a Moroccan debating championship,
An unlikely genre of Moroccan youtubers who are hitting the big time in Morocco,
but we start with the covid19 vaccine rollout.
On January the 28th, the Covid vaccine campaign was launched with reports that the king was the first recipient of the vaccine.
Within 24 hours, 24,000 people in Casablanca had received the first dose.
The vaccine will be offered free of charge to everyone over the age of 17;
with priority groups such as health care workers and the elderly receiving the first doses.
Casablanca is a target region because of the persistently high number of reported cases since the virus came to Morocco last March.
Morocco has bought two and a half million doses so far
composed of Sinopharm the Chinese version and Astrovenica.
Morocco has decided to vaccinate only 1.25 million people with the first batch,
ensuring all of those vaccinated will receive the two necessary injections only three weeks apart
This is in contrast to the UK whose government has decided to inject as many people as possible with the first batch of the vaccine;
meaning some citizens should expect to wait three months before the next injection of the vaccine.
Moroccan ex-convicts are hitting the big time on social media.
About 20 former prisoners are gathering online followers in their thousands as they tell of life behind bars.
One such youtuber is an ex-drug trafficker who goes by the name of "Slaoui".
The 48 year old as spent 23 years in prison, but has now turned his life around thanks to social media.
His channel has over 85,000 subscribers and his videos deal with life in Moroccan prisons.
Ilyass Korrari, also an ex-drug dealer, spent 17 years of his 38-year life in jail.
Now he has a YouTube following of almost a quarter of a million subscribers.
He even has a small recording studio in the town of Kenitra.
His videos regularly reach 50,000 views.
As with Slaoui, the videos of Ilyass focus on prison life in Morocco,
but he has now started to evolve his channel by including music production and even film-making
Proving that life on social media is much better than a life of crime
and finally congratulations to the Moroccan National Debating Team
for winning the 2021 PDA parliamentary debate world congress held in Japan, but this year over Zoom. The international
The International debate contest allows high school students from all over the world to debate in English.
It started in 2016 and attracts students from over 30 countries.
The Moroccan debating team consisted of one male and three female high school students.
They came out on top after winning all six of the debating events over the weekend period of the 23rd and the 24th of January
and that's it for this week.
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Thanks for watching.
Bye-bye now.