Marrakech – A ten-day campaign asking Moroccans at home and abroad to submit a single idea for creating jobs closes today, less than 24 hours before the country votes in its September 23 legislative election.
The initiative, #FikraMRE, invites each participant to submit one idea – a business, a skill, an investment – through the official website at fikramre.com or on any social platform tagged #FikraMRE. Every submission is compiled into a White Paper for the incoming government.
The premise reframes a familiar exchange. Moroccans living abroad transferred MAD 122.023 billion ($12.2 billion) to Morocco in 2025, according to the Office des Changes, up MAD 3.044 billion ($304 million), or 2.6%, from MAD 118.979 billion ($11.9 billion) in 2024. #FikraMRE asks the diaspora to also send expertise.
“Why does Morocco value our money more than our minds?” asked Ahmed Larouz in an interview with Morocco World News (MWN). A co-initiator of the campaign, Larouz has spent more than 25 years between the Netherlands and Morocco, co-founded Morocco Fonds, grew the Ramadan Festival to 42 cities, and leads ClimateLaunchpad Morocco.
The diaspora is “engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, researchers, teachers,” yet has “no permanent, structured channel for that knowledge to reach the people making decisions,” he lamented. For Larouz, “the gap is not a lack of ideas. It is a lack of listening.”
He launched it with Houda Znibaa and Karim Basrir, collaborators through the Diaspora Investors Forum, around one question: what would create one million jobs, innovation, and regional growth in Morocco?
Indeed, Morocco’s diaspora has long been viewed through two conventional lenses: as a source of remittances and as an informal network of goodwill abroad. #FikraMRE seeks to recast that relationship entirely, arguing that Moroccans overseas should not merely represent the country or sustain it financially, but help shape its future – moving from ambassadors to architects.
“Moroccans Around the World represent a tremendous asset for our country: skills, networks, experience, and a capacity for innovation,” said the initiators of #FikraMRE. “With #FikraMRE, we want to turn this collective wealth into concrete ideas and solutions for Morocco’s territories.”
The timing meets the mechanics of diaspora voting. Article 17 of the 2011 Constitution guarantees Moroccans abroad full citizenship rights, including the right to vote and stand for election, while legislation sets how those rights are exercised from abroad.
For September 23, registered MRE voters participate through a proxy system. The Interior Ministry’s E-Procuration platform, open from August 24 until noon on September 22, let voters abroad designate a registered elector in Morocco to cast the ballot for them. This is not online voting; the ballot is still cast physically in Morocco, and one person cannot hold more than one such proxy.
On reaching policymakers, Larouz dismissed the idea of writing yet another memo that goes nowhere. “A White Paper that sits in a drawer is worth nothing,” he told MWN. The organizers plan to present it to the incoming government, the parties forming it, and members of parliament, and to publish every consenting contributor’s idea, because “when ideas are public, they are harder to ignore.”
The follow-up means tracking which proposals are adopted and saying so publicly, with focus groups in cities abroad. “Influence is not one meeting. It is persistence.” The project, he argued, “is not a political campaign,” and the ideas “belong to the contributors.”
Artificial intelligence handles the volume. Submissions arrived in Arabic, Darija, French, Dutch, English, and more, and AI translates them, sorts them into policy pillars, and separates a government measure from a business project or a broader reflection, letting three volunteers process in days what would take months.
“AI is our assistant, not our judge,” Larouz put it. No idea is dropped for being rare, each carries its own reference number, every original submission appears in full beside its summary, and humans review the final selection. Only test entries, duplicates, and non-consenting submissions are removed.
He framed the safeguard as protection against conformity. “Some of the best ideas in history sounded strange at first. We are not going to let an algorithm average them away,” Larouz explained.
Five themes have surfaced. Contributors want a registry or matchmaking center linking diaspora professionals with Moroccan companies, since “the talent exists” while “the mechanism does not.”
They want a fully digital path to start a business, investment in industrial champions and small and medium enterprises, and clearer guidance for the young, where “orientation matters as much as a diploma.” The fifth concerns European carbon pricing that will hit Moroccan exporters.
Larouz defined success in three layers. The first, he argued, has already happened: the volume of ideas from contributors across multiple countries in ten days, “with no budget and no institution behind us.” The second is the next government adopting even a handful of the proposals. The third matters most to him – that the effort outlasts the vote. “FikraMRE stops being a campaign and becomes a habit. A permanent way for Morocco to consult its diaspora, not just every five years,” he maintained.
The stated ambition is ideas that could help create one million jobs by 2030, which Larouz called ambitious but not impossible “if we keep talking to ourselves.” As he put it, “the diaspora is not Morocco’s audience. It is part of Morocco’s team.”
