By Andrei Skvarsky.
The guests at a July 30 ceremony in Tangier celebrating Moroccan King Mohammed VI’s 19th anniversary of enthronement included the chief of the African Development Bank (AfDB), which has put more than $10bn into the Maghreb country’s economy over the past half-century.
The AfDB is currently running 33 projects in Morocco worth a total of $3.1bn, the bank said in a statement published by APO, an Africa and Middle East-focused news service.
More than 85 per cent of this money is going into basic infrastructure in sectors including energy, transport, water supply, sanitation, agriculture, and social services, according to the statement.
One of the AfDB’s flagship projects in Morocco is the Ouarzazate concentrated solar power plant, which is under construction and will be the world’s largest when finished. It has already “enabled Morocco to achieve almost total national electricity coverage”, the statement said.
Other projects the AfDB has helped pull off are laying a submarine electricity line between Morocco and Spain, building a thermo-solar power plant in Ain Beni Mathar in northern Morocco, laying a motor road between Marrakech and Agadir, and expanding Marrakech Menara Airport.
The AfDB is also involved in the Green Morocco Plan, a plan for a sweeping agricultural reform.
The AfDB, which is owned by 54 African and 26 non-African countries, credited King Mohammed VI with overseeing “close to two decades of Morocco’s economic transformation”.
“I reiterate here the Bank’s commitment to supporting His Majesty King Mohammed VI’s vision for inclusive growth and shared prosperity,” the lender’s statement quoted AfDB president Akinwumi Adesina as saying during the Throne Day ceremony in Tangier.
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.