AKHANNOUCH SAYS MOROCCO ON TRACK TO CREATE OVER 1 MILLION JOBS BY END OF 2026

Morocco is on track to create more than one million jobs by the end of 2026, Head of Government Aziz Akhannouch announced on Friday as he chaired a government meeting to review progress in the country's employment strategy. According to data presented during the meeting, Morocco's economy created 850,000 jobs in non-agricultural sectors between 2021 and 2025, with an annual average of 170,000 positions. In 2025 alone, 233,000 jobs were created the highest single-year figure of the government's term. If that momentum is sustained through the end of 2026, the government said, the total could exceed one million positions.

The caveat in that statement is critical and politically loaded. The government explicitly conceded that the one-million estimate does not include losses in the agricultural sector, which has been battered by successive years of drought conditions. Morocco's agricultural sector employs millions of rural workers, and critics have argued consistently that a jobs target stripped of agricultural losses presents a dangerously incomplete  and misleadingly optimistic picture of the overall labour market. Even the government's own data shows that while urban areas have been consistently adding jobs, rural employment has been declining, often sharply, driven by climate-related disruptions and insufficient investment in productive sectors outside of farming.

The meeting also laid out a forward programme of employment initiatives. Existing programmes "Idmaj" and "Tahfiz" will be extended to new sectors to support job integration. A new programme called "Tadarouj" will scale up apprenticeship training across industries, with a target of integrating 100,000 trainees annually into the workforce. The government also reviewed a dedicated scheme for entrepreneurship support, under which 170 project applications had been submitted primarily in industry, hospitality and food services  with 21 approved, representing investments of MAD 312 million, with MAD 49 million in direct government support.

The broader economic context in which Friday's announcement was made remains deeply challenging. Morocco's unemployment rate stood at approximately 13% in 2025 marginally down from 13.3%, but still leaving around 1.62 million people without work. Youth unemployment between the ages of 15 and 24 actually increased from 36.7% to 37.2% over the same period, a statistic that strikes directly at the heart of a pledge whose political rationale was to provide opportunity for Morocco's young population. Women's unemployment also rose, from 19.4% to 20.5%. The jobs being created, the data suggests, are not yet reaching the groups who need them most.

The political history of this target is equally complex. As recently as May 2025, Nizar Baraka  Secretary General of the Istiqlal Party and a minister within Akhannouch's own coalition government publicly declared: "It's over, we cannot create one million jobs by 2026. We tell the truth to Moroccans." He cited the structural impact of drought-induced agricultural losses and the difficulty of meeting the target in the remaining months of the government's term. That a senior coalition partner conceded failure less than a year before the deadline makes Friday's optimism all the more politically striking and all the more dependent on the precise definitions and inclusions in the final accounting.

For Morocco, the employment story is inseparable from its broader national transformation narrative. The country is preparing to co-host the 2030 FIFA World Cup alongside Spain and Portugal and has positioned itself as a continental technology hub, hosting GITEX Africa in Marrakech and rising 14 places in the government AI readiness index in 2025. Akhannouch noted that Morocco's digital investments have grown from MAD 11 million in 2021 to MAD 1.7 billion in 2024, and that the country has attracted major cloud computing and research and development investments. These are not empty branding exercises  they represent a genuine economic diversification that the employment data, in time, should reflect.

The one-million jobs pledge, made during the September 2021 election campaign, was always a political statement as much as an economic projection. It set a bar that the government has spent five years struggling to clear while facing successive droughts, the post-pandemic recovery, global inflation and rising input costs. 

The 2025 momentum is real, and the government's data on its own terms does point toward the threshold. But with youth unemployment rising, rural jobs disappearing, and 1.62 million Moroccans still without work, the gap between the headline number and the lived reality of the labour market remains the defining political question of Akhannouch's final months in office.