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Join on Telegram Marrakech – “The US is an unmatched entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem,” observes Mehdi El Khatib, Managing Director of Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) Global Hubs – United States, in an exclusive interview with Morocco World News (MWN). “It has more than 30 cities in the top 100 most innovative globally, far beyond the usual suspects of San Francisco, New York, and Boston.”
With a concentration of two-thirds of global venture capital and more than 600 unicorns, Uncle Sam’s economy is seen by much of the world as the epicenter where ideas, capital, and technologies converge. For Morocco and Africa, establishing a foothold there is key to high visibility in global circuits.
This is precisely why the inauguration of Morocco’s UM6P Global Hub in the United States, on September 8, was deliberately staged at the heart of American decision-making networks, with one office in New York and another in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The symbolism was clear: UM6P is embedding itself in the world’s most competitive innovation and policy ecosystems. The choice of locations was purposeful: New York, at the doorstep of the UN and Wall Street, anchors diplomacy and finance, while Cambridge, adjacent to MIT and Harvard, places Moroccan and African initiatives within the densest circuits of technology, capital, and policy.
“We are not starting from scratch in America,” El Khatib explains to MWN. “UM6P has longstanding collaborations with institutions like MIT, Columbia, UC Davis, and the University of Arizona. This hub is about consolidating those ties into a structured platform.”
In his words, the US launch formalizes a bridge where Moroccan and African researchers, startups, and executives can enter the world’s most competitive innovation ecosystem.
The symbolic power of a Moroccan university opening a transatlantic hub cannot be overstated. The inauguration was no ordinary ribbon-cutting; staged in Manhattan with the presence of Morocco’s Ambassador to the US, Youssef Amrani, and Permanent Representative to the UN, Omar Hilale, it delivered a strong message that the initiative carries the weight of national strategy.
Far more than a mere campus announcement, the launch reflects a new layer of diplomacy in which universities and research centers act as complementary platforms to embassies, channeling influence through knowledge, startups, and students. By extending UM6P’s philosophy of applied science and entrepreneurship into global circuits, the US hub also places African talent inside the decision-making centers of the world’s knowledge economy.
A ‘collaboration engine’
The hub’s thematic scope embodies the very fabric of UM6P’s DNA. At the heart of the design are six thematic priorities: sustainable agriculture, water resilience, artificial intelligence, energy transition, healthcare, and mining.
These areas were chosen because they combine Africa’s most urgent challenges with Morocco’s existing competitive advantages. From phosphates and fertilizers to arid-zone agriculture and renewable energy, the university is positioning itself as a problem-solving platform able to translate African assets into globally relevant innovations.
In practical terms, the hub is designed to act as a “collaboration engine” across three tracks: research and development, entrepreneurship and innovation, and executive education. This architecture mirrors UM6P’s “learning by doing” pedagogy at home, ensuring that projects can move quickly from laboratory to pilot to market in partnership with American institutions.
The hub also complements UM6P’s earlier international expansions. This started with the opening of UM6P France in Paris in January 2024, then embedding within Station F’s startup campus in February 2025, and subsequently launching UM6P Canada in Montreal in September 2024. The university now adds a US node to its tri-continental network.
Together, Paris-Montreal-New York/Cambridge form a corridor for faculty mobility, startup acceleration, and joint research calls, explicitly placing Africa at the center of the agenda.
“The launch of UM6P’s Global Hub in the United States is a testament to the commitment of UM6P to build solid foundations for a continued and lasting collaboration with key stakeholders of the American learning and innovation ecosystem: universities, national labs, industries, startups, investors, experts…” says El Khatib.
For him, the ambition is not only symbolic. By placing African research and entrepreneurship in direct dialogue with American innovation clusters, the hub creates a transatlantic circuit of knowledge and practice – one that is expected to deliver breakthroughs in energy, food, and digital transformation, and to reinforce Morocco’s role as a gateway to Africa for research, innovation, and investment.
Three pillars of action
The US hub is not a generic outpost but an organized platform. El Khatib organizes the hub’s mission around three pillars: research and development, entrepreneurship and innovation, and executive education. These are the structural drivers that UM6P believes can transform Morocco’s and Africa’s innovation footprint when connected with US partners.
Each pillar corresponds to a different circuit of influence. Research builds knowledge and patents. Entrepreneurship creates companies and jobs. Executive education trains leaders and decision-makers. Together, they form the foundation of a “collaboration engine” that moves ideas from lab to pilot to market with US partners.
“The objective for year 1 is two-fold: launching successful programs and initiatives on each of these three pillars while building the backbone of the organization,” El Khatib explains. This involves both running projects and creating the institutional processes to make them sustainable.
Concretely, the first year means starting joint research projects with American universities on pre-identified challenges, launching entrepreneurship bootcamps for African startups, and running at least one executive training for local corporate partners, along with multiple learning expeditions for partners from the African continent, he outlined.
This three-track structure mirrors UM6P’s approach in Morocco, where Benguerir’s Green City campus integrates labs, startups, and leadership programs in one ecosystem.
By replicating that model in the US, UM6P ensures African initiatives can circulate through the same channels that produce American startups and research breakthroughs. The hub is designed to transform African challenges into global opportunities by embedding them in US research, investment, and policy environments.
Executive education is particularly central. It builds on UM6P’s Africa Business School programs, including its already-running co-badged Executive MBA with Columbia Business School. The new US hub will broaden that cooperation into more applied training programs, extending UM6P’s model of executive learning into a transatlantic framework.
For US corporations, it means tailored access to African markets. For African executives, it provides immersion in American decision-making cultures. It is, in essence, an exercise in leadership diplomacy, preparing cohorts fluent in both African realities and American business practices.
On the entrepreneurship side, the hub will serve as a landing pad for African startups seeking scale. Entrepreneurship, the second pillar, directly addresses the funding gap: Morocco’s startup ecosystem raised about $95 million in 2024, almost triple the 2023 figure, with UM6P Ventures already supporting more than 1,000 founders and idea-holders.
The US hub is expected to act as a front door for these startups, providing exposure to mentors, potential customers, and – crucially – angel investors and venture capital. Beyond channeling American funding into African ventures, it also creates pathways for US funds to co-invest earlier in African deeptech, agritech, and climatetech, effectively integrating African innovation into global investment circuits.
The third pillar, research and development, is UM6P’s long-term play. With assets like the Toubkal supercomputer, already ranked among the world’s top 500 with 71,232 CPU cores and 3.15 petaflops, UM6P has computational muscle that can be directly connected to American research consortia. From genomic studies of African nutritional plants to renewable-energy integration and water modeling, these capacities anchor the hub’s credibility in transatlantic science partnerships.
From partners to pilots
Partnerships define the hub’s early agenda. El Khatib makes it clear that the US venture builds on existing relationships rather than starting from zero. “We are not starting from scratch; the United States is not new to UM6P,” he asserts.
“The university has developed over the years strong ties and project collaborations with many academic partners, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Columbia University, UC Davis, University of Arizona, and many more, but also with corporate institutions such as Google, Microsoft, or more recently OpenAI,” he states.
These ties were already translating into pilot projects. UM6P had “started working with Stanford University on research projects aiming at maximizing value along mining value chains,” El Khatib recalls. Additionally, with the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), he reveals, there is “interest in exploring a broad range of energy topics from green hydrogen to energy storage solutions.”
He added that UM6P had “already deployed a few months ago an executive training in Morocco for the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), where we had the opportunity to host 25 of their members during a week of training around impact investing and social entrepreneurship in Africa” – with a second edition already planned for the following year.
The mix of partners illustrates the hub’s broad reach: elite universities, global tech companies, sports associations, and venture capital networks. Each collaboration serves as a pilot that tests how African and American ecosystems can co-develop solutions. From mining innovation to hydrogen storage, these projects reflect Africa’s priorities but are designed to resonate globally.
Learning expeditions are another early program. UM6P is planning structured visits to innovation hubs across Boston, New York, and North Carolina starting late 2025. These expeditions will allow African partners to directly engage with US labs, incubators, and investors. An executive training for a US partner is already scheduled for Morocco in the second quarter of 2026. The goal is to create visible and replicable pilots that anchor the hub’s credibility.
The institutional architecture supports this agenda. The hub reports to a board of directors, with the ambition of becoming self-sustaining within three to five years. Revenue will come from program fees, executive education, and joint ventures, not subsidies. The staff will remain lean but strategically deployed, covering the three pillars while also engaging with the diaspora, producing thought leadership, and fundraising.
For UM6P, this model ensures that partnerships evolve into pilots, and pilots into scalable programs. It reflects the university’s philosophy of “learning by doing” – not only teaching in classrooms but building ventures, labs, and policies that address real problems in Morocco, Africa, and beyond.
Startups and capital access
If one metric explains why the hub matters, it is venture capital. As El Khatib already specified, the United States accounts for two-thirds of global venture investment, has created more than 600 unicorns – over four times the number in Europe – and boasts more than 30 cities among the world’s top 100 most innovative.
The depth of this ecosystem extends far beyond the “usual suspects” of San Francisco, New York, and Boston, making it the hardest arena for outsiders to penetrate. For African startups, breaking into that circuit has long been nearly impossible – until now. As such, El Khatib framed the hub as nothing less than a gateway designed to propel African startups into the bloodstream of global innovation.
“One of our main objectives at UM6P’s Global Hub is to serve as a platform that connects African startups to this ecosystem. We will do this mainly out of our physical space in Cambridge (near Boston), where we will be hosting startups (selected through sector-specific competitions) for all types of programs ranging from short bootcamps to full-on acceleration programs co-developed with our partners in the Boston area,” El Khatib affirms.
These programs will provide startups with training and immersion, exposing them to their peers, mentors, potential customers, talent, and investors. The idea is to replicate the density of Silicon Valley interactions, but with Africa’s problems at the center. “These programs will provide the startups with the necessary training and will allow them to be fully immersed in the ecosystem,” he details.
The Cambridge office thus becomes a landing pad for African founders. They will spend time embedded in Boston’s innovation networks, co-developing products with American partners and adjusting to global standards. For Moroccan startups in agritech, climatetech, or healthtech, this is an unprecedented opportunity to go from Benguerir or Rabat directly to global markets.
The diaspora is a further asset. UM6P intends to mobilize African professionals in North America as mentors, investors, and partners. This extends the concept of parallel diplomacy into the entrepreneurial space, where diaspora communities are treated not as remittance senders but as co-builders of ecosystems.
Programs like UM6P Ventures’ REACH-AFRICA have expanded founder pipelines, but capital access remains the bottleneck. The US hub is especially designed to break that barrier, bringing African startups into the flow of global venture deals.
For UM6P, the ultimate measure is not the number of unicorns but the number of African problems solved. By embedding African founders in US circuits, the hub ensures that solutions for food, water, and energy security can be developed at global standards and deployed at an African scale.
Anchors for domestic expansion
UM6P’s US entry does not stand alone. It builds on a rapidly growing domestic network across Morocco. Benguerir’s Mohammed VI Green City remains the flagship, Rabat-Sale has become the policy and executive education hub, and Laayoune anchors UM6P’s expansion into the Sahara.
In Rabat-Sale, the World Bank’s MIGA (Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency) issued a €243.2 million guarantee in September 2024 to finance new campus infrastructure, including residences, sports facilities, and a 1,500-seat conference center. This followed an earlier €570 million guarantee in 2022. The capital campus has already hosted the 16th General Conference of the Association of African Universities, underlining UM6P’s role as a convener in continental higher education.
In Laayoune, the Lycee d’Excellence (LYDEX) opened in September 2025, repurposing modular structures from the IMF-World Bank Annual Meetings village. The school is the first step in a broader higher-education complex designed to extend UM6P’s selective STEM training model into the southern provinces. It combines territorial development with a long-term skills pipeline for the Sahara.
Benguerir continues to house UM6P’s flagship scientific infrastructure, including the Toubkal supercomputer, laboratories, and conference complexes. With 7,300 students from 40 nationalities, including 1,000 PhD candidates, the campus is now a pan-African hub.
Inclusion remains central: 80% of students are on scholarships, with 60% receiving full support. Over 200 institutional partnerships and support for more than 1,000 founders confirm the scale of the ecosystem.
This domestic expansion is strategically tied to internationalization. The Paris, Montreal, and now New York/Cambridge hubs project UM6P’s model outward, but the anchor remains Moroccan soil. It is from Benguerir, Rabat, and Laayoune that UM6P draws its credibility as a truly African university.
By reinforcing its national footprint, UM6P ensures that its global ambitions remain grounded. The US hub is therefore not a detour but an extension, built on a domestic foundation that integrates research, entrepreneurship, and education into Morocco’s national development strategy.
OCP philosophy and parallel diplomacy
UM6P is inseparable from OCP Group, one of the world’s largest phosphate and fertilizer companies. For the century-old phosphate giant that generated nearly MAD 97 billion (≈$10 billion) in 2024, education is not philanthropy but strategy: a way to create the skills needed for food security, industrial transformation, and sustainability. UM6P is the vehicle through which that philosophy is implemented.
OCP’s Green Investment Program (2023-2027), valued at $12-13 billion, includes targets of 13 GW of renewable capacity and 3 million tons of green ammonia by 2032, with full carbon neutrality by 2040.
Partnerships with Fortescue (hydrogen), Engie (renewables and desalination), and AFD (€350 million financing in 2025) demonstrate how this pivot is backed by global capital. UM6P’s labs, curricula, and talent pipelines are designed to supply the engineers, agronomists, and policy experts who will make these targets achievable.
The food-security rationale is explicit. OCP Chairman and CEO Mostafa Terrab often states that “without fertilizer, we could only feed half the world’s population.” Africa, which holds 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land, is the continent where this equation must be solved.
UM6P operationalizes that by mapping soils, customizing fertilizers, and developing farmer-support programs – research and programs that the US hub can connect to American universities, USDA labs, and philanthropic partners.
As recently as the 37th AFA Technical Conference hosted at UM6P in Benguerir, UM6P President Hicham El Habti underlined the urgency of this mission, stressing that by 2050, the world must feed nearly 9.7 billion people with less land, scarcer water, and climate change expected to cut yields by up to a quarter in some regions.
He framed Africa at the center of this transformation, pointing to its 60% share of global unexploited arable land and its unparalleled demographic dynamism, with more than 60% of Africans under the age of 25.
The OCP Foundation complements this with social programs. In 2024, its initiatives impacted over 89,000 people, supported 281 partners, and reforested 590 hectares. It invested in digital education, supported students with disabilities, and promoted women’s cooperatives. This “servant leadership” approach reflects OCP’s attempt to anchor sustainability and inclusion in its growth model.
For El Khatib, these layers add up to what he calls “parallel diplomacy.” He explains that some activities deliver short-term impact, such as entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives, while others, like research, are designed to bear fruit over the long run.
Ultimately, he summarizes that the measure of success will be UM6P’s ability to generate global scientific and technological breakthroughs “for the benefit of Morocco and Africa.”
This is diplomacy through laboratories, startups, and classrooms rather than embassies alone. The hub’s partnerships with UNESCO, USAID, and the World Bank reflect this model: embedding Morocco’s influence in global research agendas, agricultural practices, and sustainability standards. It is a strategy that projects Morocco’s relevance through knowledge rather than rhetoric.
A corridor for transatlantic development
Looking at the big picture, the creation of the UM6P Global Hub in the US signals Morocco’s intent to co-author global solutions and switches on the institutional circuits to make such cooperation routine. The Paris, Montreal, and New York/Cambridge nodes now form a tri-continental corridor that connects African talent to European and North American innovation ecosystems.
This architecture is not accidental. UM6P’s model integrates domestic capacity building in Benguerir, Rabat, and Laayoune with international reach across three continents. By doing so, it positions Morocco as both a regional hub and a global interlocutor. The US hub in particular leverages America’s venture capital, research depth, and diaspora to accelerate African problem-solving.
For Morocco, the payoff is multidimensional: greater visibility, stronger scientific credentials, expanded startup pipelines, and influence in global debates on food, water, and energy. For OCP, it creates the human capital and innovation pipelines necessary to realize its green transition. For African students and startups, it offers access to the most advanced innovation ecosystems in the world.
El Khatib sums up the philosophy in practical terms: year-one success means new research projects, startup bootcamps, and executive training, while in the long run, it means breakthroughs that change the trajectory of African development.
As the hub begins its work, it embodies a new form of Moroccan diplomacy – one that uses universities as much as embassies, and labs as much as treaties. With its US presence now operational, UM6P has become not just a Moroccan university but a transatlantic platform for African innovation and diplomacy.
