The High Commissioner for Planning (the official body in charge of statistics) in Morocco announced on Monday that more than 4 million citizens are threatened with poverty in the country.
This came in a report issued on Monday by the High Commission for Planning on National Research Results on the standard of living of families.
In a report on the results of the national research on the standard of living of families, the authority said that “the number of people suffering from economic fragility in 2023 reached about 4.75 million people.”
The authority explained that “fragility is the extent of families at the risk of poverty in the absence of safety networks (governmental programs for support and creating jobs) that enable them to confront economic and social shocks.”
And she considered that “social policies had a tangible impact on the reduction of poverty, but the non -targeted social groups of these policies increased their fragility, which caused an increase in the percentage of families facing the risk of poverty, for the first time, at the urban and rural levels.”
The report stated that “the standard of living of families has improved structurally, but without this dynamism to reduce the differences” between poor, medium and rich families.
The poverty rate recorded 4.8% during 2014 and decreased to 1.7% during 2019, increasing again to 3.9% during 2023, according to the same authority.
The total number of the poor at the national level in 2023 amounted to 1.42 million people, including 512 thousand in the urban center and 906 thousand in the rural center.
The report pointed out that the average annual income for the individual amounted to 21,949 dirhams (2194 dollars) during 2023, and added that about 7 out of every 10 (71.8%) has an annual income less than the national average.
Recently, Moroccan Prime Minister Aziz Akhenouch said that his government succeeded in achieving an “unprecedented social revolution”, and made Morocco “the first social state” in the African continent.
He added in a conference in the city of Agadir that the government launched many social programs in recent years, such as circulating health insurance with a budget of 9.5 billion dirhams (950 million dollars), in addition to financial support for poor and fragile families, as 3.9 million families benefit per month between 500 dirhams (50 A dollar) and a thousand dirhams ($ 100), which was the program that started at the beginning of 2024.
It is noteworthy that the research was between March 2022 and March 2023 for a sample of 18 thousand families representing various social social groups and all regions of the Kingdom.
The population of Morocco exceeded 36 million people during 2024, according to official statistics.
