HIBAPRESS – Mohamed Zerouih
The regional office of the Youth Labor Movement, affiliated with the Moroccan Labor Union in Nador, organized an intellectual seminar on the topic "Youth, Migration, and Employment: What Development Model for the Rif Region" on Sunday afternoon, October 24, 2026.
The seminar was chaired by the Secretary-General of the Youth Labor Movement in Nador, activist Abdel Razak Mohammedi. It began with a speech delivered by the Secretary-General of the Moroccan Labor Union in Nador, Brother Rabie Mezid. He praised the initiative of the Youth Labor Movement in organizing this seminar and emphasized the importance of opening a public debate on issues of youth, migration, and employment in relation to development in the Rif region. He considered that the Union has been and will remain a pioneer in fostering meaningful discussions on pressing societal issues, alongside the struggle and organizational guidance of the working class.
The Secretary-General of the Moroccan Labor Union in Driouch, Jamal Alaoui, contributed to the seminar with a presentation on "Public and Private Investment in the Rif: Between Development Requirements, the Challenge of Permanent Employment, and the Protection of Social Rights." He stressed that investment, from a labor perspective, is not an end in itself but rather a means to achieve social development. He reviewed the most prominent drivers and pillars that the local economy in the Rif region relied on, while evaluating the current and potential impacts of completed and announced projects on the employment situation in the region, foremost among them the Nador West Med port project and its associated industrial and logistical zones.
Alaoui pointed out that it is impossible to talk about building a new development model in the region without a comprehensive transformation in the adopted policies and in the planning, execution, and monitoring methods of public projects and programs. This should be done through the involvement of social actors in all these stages. He also emphasized the necessity of creating a social and political breakthrough, starting with the release of the detainees of the Rif movement and a reconsideration of the current regional division, granting genuine powers to the regions in choosing their economic priorities, taking into account their specificities and natural and human resources.
The researcher in sociology, Khalid Al-Aouni, contributed to the seminar with a presentation titled "From Remittance Economy to Investing Transnational Competencies: Towards an Alternative Sociological Approach to Youth Employment and Achieving Sustainable Development in the Rif." He focused on studying the phenomenon of migration and the roles of migrants in the economic development of the region. He presented several proposals to transform the issue of migration into a contributing factor in creating job opportunities and ensuring a decent livelihood for the youth of the region.
As for Mohamed Salihi, head of the branch of the National Association of Unemployed Certificate Holders in Morocco, he reviewed in his presentation the most prominent constraints and obstacles faced by unemployed youth in the region in their quest for permanent employment. He also stressed that the prevalence of temporary work in the private sector and parts of the public sector contributes to entrenching the phenomenon of migration and pushing young people to seek escape to the other side in search of better working and living conditions.
The attendees of the seminar interacted with the main presentations by offering opinions and viewpoints that reflected the level of discontent with the adopted social policies, and they emphasized the need to continue the unified struggle for youth's right to decent work and true professional and social stability.
