A latest Afrobarometer Survey has established that unemployment is the most important problem that Moroccans want the government to resolve.
The survey also shows a strong popular preference for expanding free education to the university level.
Citizens give the government increasingly poor marks for its performance in creating job and suggest that the best way to address the problem of youth unemployment is by providing
incentives to private companies, setting up credit lines to finance businesses of young people, and improving education and training.
The study also shows that only a few Moroccans favour paying school fees in order to improve the quality of education in the country; a significant proportion prefer free schooling, even if the quality of education is low. Though overwhelming majorities believe free schooling promotes education for girls and that it should be extended to the university level, more than half of Moroccans think that high enrollment rates come at the expense of quality.
The release of the data coincides with Morocco’s efforts to reform national education and vocational training policies in order to ensure a better match between training and employment, with the aim of reducing unemployment and properly integrating the youth into the labor market.
The report shows that only one in 10 Moroccans (11%) say the government is doing “fairly well” or “very well” on job creation, a 7-percentage-point decrease since 2013.
Unemployment is the most important problem that Moroccans want the government to address, cited by 66% of respondents.
Moroccans say the best way for government to tackle the problem of youth unemployment is by providing incentives to private companies (34%), setting up credit lines to finance businesses of young people (27%), and improving education
and training (25%) whilst only one in seven Moroccans (14%) favour paying school fees in order to improve the quality of education.
An overwhelming majority of Moroccans “agree” or “strongly agree” that free education should be extended to the university level (91%) and that it promotes education for girls up to the high school level (87%) and More than half (53%) of Moroccans “agree” or “strongly agree” that free schooling has resulted in high enrollment rates, but at the expense of quality.