Morocco's sustainability today

Much of today's global poverty stems from the gap between the vision, intention and codification of policies to support people-driven change and growth, and unsatisfactory implementation, lack of enforcement and increasingly deep stratification.

The very real disappointment is compounded by how unnecessary the lack of compliance really is.

In Morocco, both in rural and urban areas, opportunities abound. National frameworks for shared sustainable growth are well thought out and articulated. People appreciate their origins in all parts of the kingdom and, like almost everyone else, just want to work and work hard when given the opportunity.

I have never found reason to blame communities or groups of people for conditions of poverty. Social and historical circumstances, combined with inconsistent implementation of established programmes and budgets, explain the failure to bridge the ‘two speeds’ of development that, as King Mohammed VI recently described, the nation's generations must still overcome.

Inspired by the monarch's vision, Morocco's young people, communities, and rural neighbourhoods can identify and implement development projects that directly address their specific needs. At the same time, this can inspire countries around the world facing their own despair and fragility.

Projects that generate growth and endure, and that are directly experienced by the communities that need them most, must be determined by those communities. There is no lesson more widely identified than this: people devote their energy and time to sustaining development that they themselves have identified, managed, and benefited from. But how is this achieved?

Across cultures and experiences, and certainly over decades in Morocco, communities' determination of local socio-economic and environmental projects does not necessarily guarantee that those initiatives directly align with the interests they themselves describe.

This is true when, like most people in our world, they have never been asked about their vision before participating in an inclusive community dialogue to plan actions for their development.

How do they respond when they have not yet reflected on their heart's goals in life or developed the confidence necessary to express and pursue them? How do they react when they feel, in their local environment, the social controls that accompany tradition or the roles they are expected to play based on their age, gender, and demographics?

Morocco advocates ministerial and national strategies for community-driven projects in agriculture, education, health, business development, and other essential areas. It needs to invest heavily in empowerment programmes—personal and collective development—so that the nation's local communities (starting with women and young people) cultivate clarity of project goals, backed by determination, to understand and achieve their own dreams.

Open forums that do not first create a sense of personal direction and self-analysis of individuality, social relationships, career prospects, and other key areas of life result in a disconnect between the projects that emerge and what people really want.

Empowerment before project planning aligns people's sincere will with defined project types and objectives.

These shared growth movements require trained facilitators who develop their skills through hands-on learning experience.

Young people are an incredibly promising demographic to play this agency role. They clearly have immense desire. They seek a productive and recognised outlet to improve their society, and they are essential to locally driven processes that achieve employment and a better world.

Young people are also suffering. They are organising and raising their voices. In Morocco, we see the exasperation of young people when they see that their innate vocation is widely rejected.

Where and how do we train our young people so that they can be the initiators of community action to define and carry out projects that meet their priority needs? The youth centres established throughout the country represent, in general, enormous possibilities, but they lack sufficient resources and personnel.

These places should be training centres for empowerment, where young people not only pursue their own development and that of the community, but also develop their skills as assistants in these processes, creating experiences of personal and group exploration.

All public universities in Morocco have established strategies to provide students with applied experiences involving community participation, but, once again, there is a lack of resources to effectively meet this need.

A significant proportion of students at public universities come from rural areas. With their key skills to promote development designed at the local level and with the necessary support, they would take full advantage of the opportunity to return to their fields and create initiatives with other young people and with the communities as a whole.

To this end, it is essential to train teachers, directors and staff of youth centres, members of civil associations, members of municipal councils and administrative staff who are committed to the local population in these techniques of inspiration and guidance of individuals and groups towards empowerment.

We cannot expect university students and participants in youth centres to know about or even engage in this without the guidance of the professionals responsible for these institutions.

With a determined approach and resources for planning personal and community actions and workshops to build self-confidence, we gain clarity about the most important projects that people want to implement.

Although empowerment workshops are fundamental to sustainable development, they cannot replace the absolutely essential need for project implementation.

People's initiatives must be realised in order to generate employment, food security, economic and environmental resilience, access to water and water management, artisan and agricultural cooperatives, family literacy, preservation of cultural heritage, school infrastructure and other priorities.

Of the many excellently formulated sustainable development policies that have been codified since the King's accession to the throne in 1999, the Roadmap for decentralisation is undoubtedly one of the most creative and has the greatest potential for building a prosperous future. Its practical implementation is considered insufficient, although it is supported by law.

One of the main reasons why it is slow to have an impact at the local level is that most communities have not experienced their own empowerment, and inclusive and participatory dialogue and planning for the future are not their usual modus operandi.

When more decision-making authority is transferred to places that are already socially stratified, decentralisation can, in fact, further entrench these imbalances, with those who have privileges and capital gaining even more influence.

Therefore, decentralisation occurs when communities act collectively, co-design and participate in decision-making to achieve shared personal and group goals.

The decentralisation of Morocco is a regionalisation, which develops administrative capacity within its 12 regional capitals, with the result that local cooperatives formed and managed by the population are not sufficiently strengthened.

The delegation component of decentralisation, which takes advantage of the community dimension, needs tangible strengthening. It is difficult to imagine that a highly centralised public administration can be decentralised effectively. The pace of this necessary process of decentralisation is not exceeding the capacity of the population to help meet their own vital needs.

A ministry of decentralisation, which is not in the hands of the ruling party but reports directly to the King as the final arbiter of the nation, may be what is needed to guarantee the deconcentration component of Morocco's decentralisation.

This cross-sectoral collaboration at all administrative levels complies with the other elements of Morocco's decentralisation roadmap to ultimately carry out the development projects of the local population itself.

I imagine that no one feels greater frustration and disappointment than the King of Morocco, who has conceived and established all the necessary guidelines to promote opportunities in communities.

He also established the priority of mountainous regions and oases, which cover 30% of the country, where economic, educational and health difficulties are comparatively greater. But what evidence do we have that governments will actually overcome the systemic gap, when most young people and women in rural areas bear the brunt of poverty?

I have spent years of my life in the mountains of Morocco, dedicated to community development. The most effective strategies for achieving widespread development can only come from a commitment to spending time inspiring the community with their own path to the future.

Once the population builds visions of empowered growth, creating proposals and business plans is parallel, if the level of local literacy is not sufficient to create the written plans of financial donors. The replication of infrastructure and community actions is faster when the villages furthest from the provincial capitals are involved first (rather than working from those closest to urban centres outwards, which is more common).

But are civil servants sufficiently dedicated and do they have the means to travel as much as necessary to co-create community proposals and help them obtain the resources they need to implement their dream projects?

I have seen incredibly determined and truly admirable civil servants in all agencies, and I sincerely hope that they continue to make progress. The opening of the role of catalyst and facilitator in the country's jurisdictions is there for young people to take on, and they can learn about it and have their capacity strengthened to fulfil it with applied learning programmes of national importance.

As for the cost, consider it an example and a benchmark. There are 1,538 municipalities in Morocco, and 1,282 are rural. After helping rural communities in the 12 regions to plan the projects they most want, it was found that water infrastructure for drinking and recycling for irrigation; capacity building with civil groups and cooperatives in production activities, organisational management and training of trainers on a large scale; mountain landings to produce food and contain erosion; resilient agriculture of fruit, forest trees and medicinal plants; product processing and other value-added activities, such as carbon offset credits; school infrastructure and historical preservation that improves livelihoods.

The average cost of implementing these projects, which involve the participation of trained youth and other facilitators of empowerment and community planning, is approximately US$3 million per rural municipality.

In other words, the US$4 billion devoted to this decentralised methodology could not only eradicate rural poverty and enable young people, women and farming communities who have suffered the most severe inequality in Morocco to achieve their best future in their place of origin, but could also give new meaning to responsibility for the future in terms of what it means to welcome the world for sporting, cultural and other events that unite humanity.

Morocco can demonstrate to all nations that the gap between aspirations and reality can be bridged and that the sadness and heartbreaking loss of people's potential can finally disappear.

Dr Yossef Ben-Meir is president of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco.