Doha – Morocco has officially moved from “medium human development” to “high human development” status according to the 2025 Human Development Index (HDI) published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) on Tuesday.
The North African country maintained its 120th position globally among 193 countries but improved its overall score to 0.710, crossing the crucial 0.700 threshold that marks entry into the high development category.
In the previous year’s report, Morocco held the same rank but with a score of 0.698, which placed it in the medium development group.
“This improvement reflects significant advances in the fundamental dimensions of human development: health, education, and standard of living,” according to Morocco’s National Human Development Observatory.
The report indicates Morocco’s life expectancy at birth stands at 75.3 years, with expected years of schooling at 15.1 years and actual schooling years at 6.2, while gross national income per capita reaches $8,653.
Despite this progress, Morocco still lags behind several regional neighbors. Algeria (96th), Tunisia (105th), and Libya (115th) all rank higher in the global standings, as do Lebanon (102nd) and Gabon (108th).
Morocco ranked 13th among Arab countries, with the UAE leading the region at 15th globally, followed by Saudi Arabia (37th), Bahrain (38th), Qatar (43rd), Oman (50th), and Kuwait (52nd).
However, data shows that 6.4% of Moroccans continue to live in multidimensional poverty, with an average deprivation rate of 42% across essential domains.
Read also: Is Morocco Really Doing Badly in Human Development?
Critics of the HDI argue its rankings can be misleading. In an interview with MWN last year, Political scientist Abdelkarim Amengay notes the index “heavily relies on GDP per capita, which automatically favors oil-producing countries but doesn’t reflect the reality of other factors.”
He questions how Libya, with dysfunctional state institutions for over a decade, could rank higher than Morocco, pointing to how oil wealth inflates GDP figures without necessarily improving citizens’ lives.
Regarding gender equality, Morocco falls into the fifth global group – those countries with the lowest equity levels – scoring 0.859 on the Gender Inequality Index.
While the report acknowledges a downward trend in this index, suggesting gradual improvement, it stresses that Morocco must focus on “reducing maternal mortality rates, increasing women’s representation in decision-making bodies, and improving their access to education and the labor market.”
AI and human development
At the international level, Iceland tops the HDI rankings, followed by Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany, while South Sudan, Central African Republic, Somalia, Chad, Niger, and Mali occupy the bottom positions.
This year’s UNDP report, titled “A matter of choice: People and possibilities in the age of AI,” brings to the forefront the importance of freedom of choice in human development and examines how AI can support this freedom.
It pinpoints that while AI is advancing rapidly, human development struggles to keep pace, with nearly a third of people worldwide expecting AI to soon affect education, health, and work regardless of their development level.
The report warns of a concerning global trend, noting that if the current slow growth in human development becomes the norm, development goals could be delayed by decades, making the world “less safe, more divided, and more vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks.”
