Germany contributes €571 million to Morocco’s reforms implementation

Germany will contribute €571 million to the implementation of Morocco’s reforms seeking to improve business and investment climate, update the financial sector and strengthen advanced regionalization.

The reform partnership MoU, signed Friday in Berlin, falls in the frame of the G20 Initiative Compact with Africa and aims at developing further the potential of the private sector and promoting sustainable economic growth over the period 2020-2022.
The program primarily seeks to support SMEs and start-ups and facilitate their access to financing, in order to turn them into a real lever for economic and social inclusion.

Moroccan Minister of economy and finance, Mohamed Benchaaboun, and German Minister of Development Gerd Müller who initialed the MoU welcomed the excellent relations of cooperation and friendship between Morocco and Germany and reiterated both parties’ resolve to develop further these relations.

Morocco is part of a group of African countries that have first pledged reforms under the Compact with Africa Initiative, a Germany’s flagship G20-Africa Partnership project aiming to improve economic conditions across the continent, whose third meeting was held last November.

The Compact with Africa aims to increase sustainable private sector investment, as well as improving infrastructure and tackling unemployment.

Labelled as the “Marshall Plan” for Africa or the “Merkel Plan,” the Compact with Africa looks forward to creating a departure from ordinary development aid, marking an end to the random approach of distributing funds, which has proved not to have worked.

Also, during a conference, held earlier this week in Berlin, on the sidelines of the 10th Arab-German Energy Forum, Morocco and Germany highlighted the existence of new opportunities for cooperation in the field of clean renewable energies, such as hydrogen.

German operators stressed, at the conference held under the theme “Energy Transition in the Arab World”, that Morocco is a concrete example of successful achievements in the field of renewable energies, and has enormous potential for the use of new renewable energy sources in the fields of industry and sustainable transport.

Bilateral partnership will take a qualitative leap forward in the field of new renewable energy sources such as the use of hydrogen, in order to improve the technical performance of renewable energy, particularly in storage and use in industrial or transport sectors, CEO of the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (MASEN), Mustapha Bakkoury, had then said.

The energy mix in Morocco is open to all renewable energy technologies and new sources, he explained, adding that the Kingdom aims to develop the hydrogen sector for electricity storage. Thanks to its national energy strategy, which has yielded significant results, Morocco could be among the major international players in hydrogen production, use and even export, Bakkoury said.