AfDB approves €120 Mln financing for Morocco’s higher education

The Board of Directors of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group has approved funding of €120 million under the Transformation Support Program for a Moroccan Digital, Entrepreneurial, and Inclusive University (UM 4.0).

This program, which targets students, higher education teachers, entrepreneurs and young graduates, aims to contribute to the development of human capital and the empowerment of young people, through more inclusive access to excellent, innovative higher education in synergy with the local ecosystem, said the AfDB in a statement issued on the occasion of its Annual Meetings 2024, which run until May 31 in Nairobi.

Specifically, the program involves building and equipping the 4,500-seat Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy in Beni Mellal, building five 1,500-bed university halls of residence in Larache, Oujda, Safi, Taroudant, and Beni-Mellal, and setting up 10 agile coding centers open to the professional world to develop active, project-based learning, according to the same source.

It also provides for setting up university career centers (on-site and online support services) that will benefit 130,000 students, establishing 12 professional integration units at university level, creating 12 entrepreneurship support centers for 15,000 students, and certifying the entrepreneurial skills of 20,000 students.

The said program also aims to digitize educational and scientific research services for students and teachers (orientation, reorientation and pre-registration platform, national capacity building platform, mobility and scholarship management platform, career management platform, e-learning platforms, etc.) and to deploy an IT infrastructure and a data center (digital data center), to set up 167 “careers of excellence” in academic centers of excellence established in open access universities.

In addition, it is meant to train newly recruited higher education teachers and prepare decision-making tools for the management, monitoring and evaluation of the higher education, research and innovation system.

One of the priorities of Morocco’s 2021-2026 government program is to strengthen the foundations of the “social state” by reforming the education sector.

To accelerate the development and sustainable transformation of the higher education, scientific research and innovation ecosystem, Morocco has adopted the “Pacte ESRI 2030” national plan to accelerate the transformation of the higher education, scientific research and innovation ecosystem.

This plan, which is built around academic, scientific and operational excellence and 4.0 governance, is based on three levers of change, namely digital transformation, system performance and structuring, organization and regulation.