Rabat – As of April 2022, Morocco is a host country to 19,620 refugees and asylum seekers from over 48 countries.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) published the fresh data in their April 2022 fact sheet report.
This is an increase of 7.51% from its December 2021 report, which stated that the North African country had 18,248 refugees and asylum seekers.
According to the latest report, Syrian refugees, estimated at 5,150, account for 26.24% of total asylum seekers in the country. Guinean refugees constitute the second-largest number of refugees in Morocco. Guineans make up 15% of the total number of asylum seekers in Morocco, with 2,958 people staying in the country.
The UNHCR offers different services to help refugees and asylum seekers in Morocco. These services range from offering legal assistance and representation in courts, to providing education, emergency housing, and financial assistance to the most vulnerable.
UNHCR-Morocco collaboration
One of the solutions that the UNHCR is implementing is a resettlement program for refugees and asylum seekers. The UN’s refugee agency resettlement process works by selecting and transferring refugees from a state where they have sought protection to a third country that has approved to welcome them as refugees with permanent residence status.
According to the report, 23 refugees have been resettled in Canada and two in the United States since January 2022. The report also adds that four refugees have left Morocco in 2022 through family reunification procedures to France and Canada.
Morocco’s collaboration with the UNHCR, as well as the government’s 2013 National Strategy for Immigration and Asylum (SNIA), have elevated the Kingdom to the status of “reference country” in terms of promoting local integration of displaced people.
Read also: Morocco Hailed as Model of Humanitarian Migration Management
The UNHCR is able to provide protection services that facilitate access to national services such as education and primary health care under Morocco’s SNIA initiative, resulting in positive change for asylum seekers and refugees in the country.
Displaced people around the world
There are over 100 million displaced people in the world, according to UNHCR. These displaced people collectively form one of the world’s largest nations, which is basically a flagless country of tens of millions.
While Western countries are often the focus of news reporting on refugees, developing countries are actually those who take care of these victims of crisis and conflict. Despite developed countries taking in over 42% of global GDP, their contribution to the global refugee crisis is minimal.
In contrast, developing countries take in over 85% of global refugees, despite having their own economic issues. Currently, 35 million children are among the global refugee population, while some of the world’s poorest countries take in 27% of the world’s refugees.
The number of total displaced people was 90 million by the end of 2021, owing to a variety of structural economic inequalities, conflicts, human rights violations, and violence in countries such as Ethiopia, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, and Afghanistan. Now with the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, an additional eight million people have been forcibly displaced since the Russian invasion began in February.
