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Rabat – Morocco’s National Office for Electricity and Drinking Water (ONEE) and the European Investment Bank (EIB) signed on Wednesday a new agreement worth €37.5 million (MAD 397 million). The foreign investment aims to improve Morocco’s drinking water supply production sites along with drinking water infrastructure across the kingdom.
ONEE’s Director General Abderrahim El Hafidi and the EIB’s Morocco Resident Representative Anna Barone finalized the deal and the ONEE office released a statement noting that the project will ultimately benefit small and medium sized water source operations.
The EIB has a long history of investing in Morocco’s water infrastructure projects.
In 2020, the EIB invested €617 million (MAD 6.7 billion) in Morocco’s water infrastructure. This figure surpassed the investments of 2019 which amounted to approximately €401.5 million (MAD 4.2 billion).
Read also: European Investment Bank Grants Morocco €401.5 Million for Key Sector Projects
Projects such as the Noor Atlas Project sought to build seven solar power plants with a total installed capacity of 240MW in the eastern and southern regions of Morocco.
In 2020, the ONEE launched a new initiative to upgrade the drinking water lines in Guercif by 2022. The plan intended to source the drinking water from two nearby dams, the Targa and Madi, before storing the water in a water tank with a volume of 6,000 cubic meters.
Despite the many improvements Morocco has made to its public drinking water infrastructure, the World Resource Institute ranked Morocco 22nd in the world for countries threatened to face high baseline water stress.
Morocco has focused extensively on the climate issues that threaten its ability to provide drinking water and continues to implement new climate change projects like the Green Morocco Plan which seek to promote a culture of sustainable development and improve the management and development of natural resources and strengthen biodiversity conservation by 2030.
