Thursday, December 3, 2020, the board of directors of the World Bank approved an envelope of $ 400 million for Morocco. The funds will be used to support its social protection system and its reform program to expand social assistance.
Morocco will receive funding of $ 400 million to support its social protection reform program. This is what the institution said in a statement posted on its website on Thursday, December 3.
According to the institution, the funds will be used to support the project of “emergency response of social protection to covid-19”. This aims to support poor and vulnerable households during the pandemic, in particular through social assistance in the form of cash transfers.
Beyond the pandemic which has already affected 379,657 people in Morocco for 6,245 deaths and 331,301 healings, the Moroccan authorities hope that this funding will help strengthen the resilience of populations to future shocks.
Thus, the funds will finance the country’s social protection system, in particular by contributing to the deployment of family allowances and at the same time improving governance, digital infrastructures and the consistency of the various social programs. Thanks to its contingency financing mechanism, the government will be able to quickly reallocate funds to react as quickly as possible to any emergencies in the coming months.
“The program is based on a short to medium term approach, aimed at mitigating the impact of the crisis on large swathes of the population while supporting the country’s efforts to build a strong social protection system. This requires a concerted overhaul of social protection programs in order to align their objectives and make them more effective, “said Mehdi Barouni, senior economist at the World Bank.
In Morocco, it is estimated that covid-19 has deprived about 712,000 formal sector workers and 4 million informal sector workers.
