Morocco’s "Cities Without Slums" Program Falls Short as Informal Settlements Grow, Minister Admits

According to Housing Minister Nouzha Bouchareb, "the number of slums in Morocco has increased by 183,000 units in 16 years, or 11,000 per year and 30 per day," reports Al Massae. And yet, the "cities without slums" program was supposed to provide decent housing conditions for families living in these unsanitary areas.

The minister implicitly admitted the failure of this program by stating that it faced many constraints, including the increase in the number of families concerned, which went from 270,000 in 2004 to 453,906 families in 2020. In total, the number of families who have benefited from this program reached, at the end of 2020, 301,914 families, or 66% of the population concerned.

The other bottleneck, according to Nouzha Bouchareb, is the inability of the beneficiaries to pay their dues and the weakness in the number of families joining the housing units built. This, according to her, delays the rehousing operation, all the more so as the reception centers suffer from a lack of essential equipment such as means of transport and others.

The minister also raises the difficulties in financing certain housing operations due to the health crisis, as well as the problem related to the rise in the cost of external development work, which requires the participation of other partners.

To save this social program, Nouzha Bouchareb has proposed several urgent measures, including the use of the stock of social housing units built by public and private developers. It will also be necessary to accelerate the rehousing of the families concerned by the units already built and to increase the pace of construction of the housing units under construction, insists the minister who calls for a complementary program in order to rehouse more than 81,000 families.