[Morocco] Poverty strikes 14.2% of Moroccans, minister

from Maghreb Arabe Presse

Social Development, Family and Solidarity Minister, Abderrahim Harouchi, said on Tuesday that the poverty rate in Morocco stands presently at 14.2 per cent of the population.

Speaking at a question time at the House of Advisors, the minister said that Morocco is now using an important mechanism to determine the rate of poverty, namely the "collective card for poverty" (la carte collective pour la pauvreté), which also makes it easy to develop poverty-eradication programs, and to determine economic and human development indicators in each rural area.

360 rural communes, he went on, where poverty rate exceeds 30% will benefit from the poverty-eradication program part of the large-scale poverty and exclusion-fighting National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) launched in May 2005.

The official also cited the anti-exclusion program, which will benefit 250 city neighborhoods, the program to fight extreme vulnerability, and the horizontal program to finance poverty-eradication projects.

He recalled that in 2004 the State earmarked over USD 36Mn to fund some 1,815 projects to the benefit of more than 2,000 associations, adding that his department last year funded 1,370 projects for a sum of nearly USD 25Mn.