Three years after Morocco adopted its first National Action Plan (NAP) on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, the Policy Center for the New South has released a detailed assessment of what the plan has achieved — and where it continues to fall short. The study, authored by Ambassador Nouzha Chekrouni and titled ‘From Commitment to Impact: Morocco’s NAP 1325 Tested by Implementation’, finds real institutional progress alongside persistent structural gaps, and calls for a more rigorous second cycle of the plan to convert declared ambition into measurable results.
On the positive side, the period since March 2022 has seen the progressive increase of women’s representation in the Royal Armed Forces in line with the UN 2018-2028 parity strategy; Morocco’s active engagement in the African Union’s Group of Friends on the intersection of climate change and the WPS agenda; the strengthening of Morocco’s network of women mediators, now linked to Mediterranean, African and Arab equivalents; and the deployment of the Moussalaha deradicalisation programme. These developments reflect genuine political will at the institutional level.
Against these advances, the study identifies four structural obstacles that significantly limit the plan’s impact. Female labour force participation remains effectively stagnant at 19.1 percent — one of the lowest rates globally. Women represent less than 3 percent of Moroccan peacekeeping contingents deployed under UN missions. Deradicalisation programmes remain insufficiently adapted to the specific trajectories of women. And the NAP’s strategic framework makes no provision for the dimensions of climate change, migration and digital transformation — all of which intersect directly with women’s security and peace engagement.
The study’s recommendations for the second NAP cycle are concrete and sequenced. The steering committee should be given adequate human and financial resources, a strengthened mandate for monitoring and evaluation, and a structured civil society consultation mechanism. Sex-disaggregated indicators broken down by region and context would replace declarative logic with results logic. The share of Moroccan women in UN peacekeeping missions should be targeted at 10 percent by 2028. The concept of positive masculinities should be integrated into national education curricula as a long-term investment in gender equality culture.
Author Chekrouni argues that the current extension of the first NAP opens a critical window to lay the foundations of the second plan properly. The governance of the WPS agenda must, she concludes, be refounded around three guiding principles: accountability, inter-ministerial coordination and sustainable financing. Civil society, which played a structuring role in shaping the first plan, must be institutionalised as a formal and independent actor in the second cycle’s monitoring and evaluation process — not merely consulted, but empowered to verify.
