Brain Drain: Morocco Loses Top Engineers to Lucrative Overseas Opportunities

The phenomenon is still making headlines today with the revelations of the newspaper Assabah, which reports that all (yes all!) of the engineers from the 2017-2018 class of the National School of Computer Science and Systems Analysis (ENSIAS) have decided to leave Morocco to try their luck abroad.

The newspaper also indicates that many foreign companies come to "go shopping" in Morocco in search of skills, particularly in the field of computer science, promising financial benefits for them and their families and a good education system for their children. To try to recruit Moroccan skills, these companies do not hesitate to use headhunters or specialized companies whose offices are established abroad.

A brain drain that is not without consequences on the local job market, as Moroccan companies are having more and more difficulty recruiting engineers in Morocco and when they manage to keep them.

According to figures revealed last year by the Minister of National Education Saaïd Amzazi, some 600 engineers trained in Morocco leave the kingdom each year to try their luck abroad. This figure is even more worrying if we look at the number of senior executives who resign each year in Morocco to leave for good abroad. According to the president of the Moroccan Federation of Information Technologies, Salwa Belkeziz-Karkari, they would be nearly 8,000 people to leave the kingdom.