Also in this issue

Starting Up
• Innovations for Foreign Investment and Economic Competitiveness in the Republic of Macedonia
• Shining a Spotlight on Girls' Education in Egypt

Publications
Beach et al., Mitigation Potential and Costs for Global Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Gessner, Sedyaningshih, Griffiths, Sutanto, Linehan, et al., Vaccine-Preventable Haemophilus Influenza Type B Disease Burden and Cost-Effectiveness of Infant Vaccination in Indonesia

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Moroccan Leaders Listen

Local governance is evolving in Morocco. Citizens are speaking out, and their leaders are listening and taking notes.

Even King Mohammed VI, chief of state of the constitutional monarchy, has responded. He punctuated the need for greater citizen involvement in the country’s decentralization process when he launched the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) in 2005 to combat poverty though community-driven development.

A woman from the Aoufous Women’s Cooperative shows how palm dates are turned into jam, adding market value and generating income for the women. [Photo: LGP staff]

Under the Local Governance Project (LGP) of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), RTI is building on this democratic momentum in Morocco and strengthening provincial and municipal governments to be more transparent, responsive, and accountable to Moroccans.

The project trains local officials and their staff in innovative approaches to governance with a focus on participatory strategic planning (PSP). A process of building consensus through public forums and consultative workshops with key stakeholders, PSP helps the local governments define their community’s priorities and form the development plans they use immediately to guide their spending.

In three years, LGP has worked in six of the country’s 15 regions, building local government capacity in five provinces and 16 municipalities, including both urban and rural communes.

Along the way to improving transparency and accountability in Morocco through PSP, RTI has created replicable models to advance gender equality and mediate conflict in slum upgrading.

Raising the Voices of Women

Since Moroccan men and women traditionally do not share the same public spaces, LGP has taken care to incorporate a gender-sensitive approach into its PSP training.

For example, in Benslimane province, LGP assisted the rural communes of Ahlaf and Melilla to choose 32 meeting points for 64 public forums—one forum for men and one for women in each location—to give a larger number of citizens opportunity to voice their concerns and needs.

In Errachidia province, one of the poorest in the country, LGP facilitated 90 public forums—involving 3,500 women, 1,500 youth, and 2,000 men—where citizens expressed their desire for better social services and more small business opportunities for women. As a result, a women’s palm dates processing cooperative was established with an LGP grant, adding value to the local production of dates by turning them into jams and other products.

LGP also partnered with civil society actors and the Ministry of Interior in 2007 to identify concrete measures for increasing women’s seats on local councils, where less than 1% of councilors are female.

Their strategy included constitutionally based recommendations for reforming the electoral code to mandate quotas for the number of women presented by parties as candidates in local council elections and reforming the communal charter to mandate quotas for the number of women sitting on the councils’ executive boards.

“If you do not sit on the executive board of the local council, your influence beyond casting a vote is very minimal,” said Chief of Party Christian Arandel. “So, to strengthen women’s voices in local government, you must first get them into the council and then onto the executive board.”

These reforms are expected to be enacted in 2009.

Resolving Conflict in the Slums

With RTI assistance, elderly and handicapped slum residents, like this man from Ennakhil slum holding his official housing assignment paper, advocated for and received accessible first-floor units in the new housing to which they were relocated under the Cities Without Slums Initiative. [Photo: LGP staff]

Also reinforcing the King’s INDH, the Moroccan Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning launched the Cities Without Slums Initiative, a nationwide program to improve living conditions in all shantytowns, or bidonvilles (literally “tin cities”), by upgrading such squatter settlements or relocating their inhabitants to formal, fully serviced neighborhoods. The scope of the initiative includes more than 280,000 slum dwellers in 1000 bidonvilles in 83 Moroccan cities.

“The slum upgrading or resettlement process is long with many potential blockages,” said Arandel. “Rumors and lack of communication spark disputes between authorities and slum dwellers that stall progress.”

LGP has assisted Cities Without Slums to overcome these standoffs by mediating a dialogue between the housing authorities and residents to be displaced.

Outside of Casablanca, the commune of Nouaceur is a perfect picture of social disparity. It is rapidly growing and hosts the country’s largest airport, yet 20% of its residents still live in slums. Local authorities requested LGP assistance with relocation of the Ennakhil slum, a 900-household bidonville on a former U.S. military base, when the slum residents, who had not been consulted beforehand, blocked the program.

RTI subcontractor Near East Foundation sent in a mediation unit of Moroccan social workers to collaborate with the local government officials, the housing operator, nongovernmental organizations, and the Ministry of Housing and Development. For two years, the unit worked to build trust between Nouaceur authorities and Ennakhil residents by (1) facilitating face-to-face meetings between the parties, (2) improving the authorities’ knowledge of the slum population through a socioeconomic study, (3) managing information flows from the top down and the bottom up, and (4) supporting community activities in the slum, like a women’s handicraft cooperative.

After this extended period of trust-building, the Ennakhil slum dwellers agreed to relocate to new housing. Three hundred households have made the transition to date, and another 600 are in the process. LGP has facilitated the move by educating the residents on the financial and administrative procedures for purchasing the apartment units, coordinating their access to credit, organizing joint ownership associations in the new communities, and offering literacy and financial awareness training to each household.

LGP has facilitated slum-upgrading initiatives in the cities of Casablanca, Mohammédia, Meknès-Tafilalet, and Kénitra. “Through collaboration among LGP, local governments, and civil society, the slum dwellers of Ennakhil and other Moroccan citizens have been included in making decisions that affect their daily lives,” said Arandel. “Under this project, participatory governance has been the foundation for problem-solving and the driver of innovation.”

 

More information:
Christian Arandel, e-mail carandel@rti.org