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The Secretary-General of Morocco’s Istiqlal Party, Nizar Baraka, recently spoke on the many challenges facing the nation. His blunt remarks came during the commemoration in Casablanca of the 81st anniversary of Morocco’s Independence Manifesto.
Baraka noted recent statistics that highlight the challenges facing youth: Unemployment for 15- to 24-year old Moroccans reaching 39 percent; women’s unemployment at about 29 percent. To these challenges, add omnipresent social media use and cyber bullying and society has all the ingredients necessary for comprehensive youth disengagement, Baraka lamented.
He then announced ambitious plans for an “advanced social contract” with the country’s youth. The broad effort is to include local, regional, and national youth consultations by Istiqlal, Morocco’s oldest political party, to develop comprehensive policy proposals for government action. “These objective causes for concern will not disappear on their own … They will only dissipate if young people move from a zone of waiting to a zone of action and contribution in formulating solutions and alternatives.”
This represents an impressive effort by Istiqlal to encourage the healthy transition from youth to young adulthood and to revitalize the frayed bonds between young Moroccans and the larger society.
The median age in Morocco in 2024 was 29.5 years, a full nine years younger than that of the United States. Young people often represent the front face of the Moroccan nation, from youthful hotel valets in Marrakech to global hip-hop star French Montana to Morocco’s stable of homegrown soccer stars that populate many of Europe’s premier teams.
A New Economy. Again.The post-World War II era saw the broad development of a familiar model in national development, in the West and in Morocco. Secondary and tertiary education followed by economic self-sufficiency and the trappings of manhood/adulthood (e.g., family formation, purchasing a home). Many factors over the past few decades have seemingly eroded the attractiveness of this model, from economic dislocations to family structure changes to shifting societal expectations on the very concept of career.
In Morocco, many rural communities bucked the trend of rural decline and small-town exodus by surviving and thriving over the past half century. From the nation’s transformative Plan Vert to a general attachment to rural and small-town life, the nation’s development pattern often paired city priorities with rural ones, agriculture with manufacturing, tourism with high-tech. Subsidized public university education alongside robust vocational training centers. Boeing and Starbucks set up shop but so did locally owned dairy co-ops in places like Rich, argan oil distributors near Marrakech and countless local tech startups. Now, a digital global economy will upend the expectations of young people again.
In the United States, NYU professor Scott Galloway has gained wide notoriety over the past few years for his analyses on the precarious status of young men in America: “The most dangerous person in the world is a man that is broken and alone.” To better help young men avoid incarceration, substance abuse and societal disengagement, Galloway recommends the building of societal guardrails for young men in America. These guardrails can come in the form of mentors, role models, and organizational structures that provide support to young people and create expectations for them.
Morocco can add to its youth engagement challenge the phenomenon of underutilized young women who now make up over half of all public university graduates. The Rabat-based think tank Policy Center for the New South warned a decade ago about the under-utilized youth workforce. “Arguably more important is the large stock of underutilized labor in the countryside and among the female population. Over 35% of the Moroccan labor force is employed in agriculture and almost 42% of this labor force is engaged in unpaid work (non rémunéré)”, the 2014 report noted.
Additionally, the service sector has introduced entire new classes of job opportunities that are often based on short-term contracts—the gig economy. Finding balance amidst this level of uncertainty represents a challenge for even the most organized young adults.
Baraka declared 2025 as Istiqlal’s “Year of Volunteering.” Echoing Professor Galloway, Baraka called for increased civic participation among party youth and, more broadly, an expansion of second-chance/vocational schools, digital skill training programs and support for youth-led projects and initiatives.
It may well be that youth participation in the larger. economy, like elsewhere in the world, has been permanently altered in Morocco. A May 2024 study by WorkProud showed just 18% of young American workers under 30 expressed strong interest in staying with their current employer for the long term. The immediate post-war years saw around 96 percent of working age American men ages 25 to 54 working full or part-time jobs. Today that proportion is 86 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Morocco and the United States have different cultures and different patterns of development. Twenty-something Moroccans may not embrace the job hopping phenomenon of their American peers but young people in both nations are trying to imagine their roles in the changing social contract.
