Self-Employed Workers Face Crisis as COVID-19 Strains Fragile Status

Fragile status, number and turnover below projections at its launch, not taken into account in the 2021 amended finance bill... Self-employed workers are going through a lean period. It took self-employed workers to put pressure to have their status and to be eligible for the "Damane Oxygène" credit during the confinement months. In July, Maroc PME stated in a press release that there were officially 230,000 members at the end of June 2020. The number of self-employed workers was around 130,000 registered at the end of 2019 (+60%) and 233,656 at the end of June 2020.

"We don’t have any statistics, no visibility on the status. (...) The number of registrations and the achievements of self-employed workers are not progressing as quickly as we would have liked. We are far from the target, behind the objectives we had set ourselves," says Zakaria Fahim, president of the Union of Self-Employed Workers and president of the SME, SME, GE-SME and Self-Employed Commission at the CGEM, to Challenges.ma. The activity report published by Maroc PME at the end of March 2019 is proof of this. The turnover generated by the 99,256 previously registered members amounted to 648 million dirhams for 11.5 million in tax revenue.

It must be acknowledged that there is no recognition, no enhancement of the status of self-employed workers. The situation of foreign residents is far from rosy. They are faced with the refusal to renew their residence permit due to their fragile and little-known status as self-employed workers. As a result, many of them find themselves without a residence permit, without a tax residence, to continue their activities.

Aware of the situation, Mr. Fahim indicates the way forward to find solutions to these problems. "We must seize the Ministry of the Interior to explain that the status of self-employed worker is a status in its own right which is exempt from the Commercial Register and which requires instead registration in the Register of Self-Employed Workers," he suggests. "There must be a circular from the ministry addressed to the prefectures so that they receive self-employed workers like any other entrepreneur. We must make a plea so that this circular is passed so that self-employed workers (nationals and foreigners) are received in the administrations as real entrepreneurs and not as pariahs," he pleads.