Rabat – The Ministry of National Education announced on Monday that the Academy of Dakhla-Oued Eddahab is adopting a special timetable for primary, secondary, and high schools in the region.
Maghreb Arab Press (MAP) reports that the ministry released a statement attributing the decision to the geographical specificity of the region, where the difference between sunrise and sunset times is 45 minutes.
The ministry added that the daylight savings time adopted in Morocco on March 25, will be applied in all central, regional, and provincial administrative services, as well as in all schools under the ministry.
In 2017, a group of activists launched a petition, calling on Prime Minister, Saad Eddine El Othmani and the Parliamentary Council to abolish the biannual time change and maintain with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) .
The signatories want the government to issue a law that would suspend the bill implementing DST indefinitely, sticking to the GMT timing “appropriate with the country’s geographical location throughout the year.”
The measures also raised a debate in Europe recently, as several member countries urged the EU to consider abolishing daylight savings.
The energy-saving practice is under review by the European Parliament, which backed a possible plan to end daylight savings time across the 28 member states after 384 deputies out of 549 voted in favor of the resolution.
Daylight savings time was first adopted during the First World War in the UK to give factories more daylight hours to operate in, thereby aiding the war.
