Temara, a city in the southeast of Rabat, is undergoing a massive operation to eradicate slums and resettle around 100,000 inhabitants to decent housing.
Videos circulating on Saturday indicate that the slums have already been reduced to rubbles. The neighborhood was home to one of the largest shanty towns in the country.
According to a report from Moroccan media Le360, some of the slums in the area date back four decades.
To provide proper housing for the inhabitants of the demolished neighborhoods, the government has partnered with private companies to build social housing units “Mimosa” and “Bassatine” in Skhirat, a city located 28 kilometers south of Rabat, the report explains.
The price of the housing units measuring 60 cubic meters is set at MAD 130,000 ($13,000), below the MAD 250,000 ($25,000) price for social housing units.
Relocating the inhabitants of the slums is set to save significant public funds amounting to MAD 30 million ($3 million) that was previously spent on providing utilities to the unregulated sum areas.
The project is part of Morocco’s ongoing efforts to eradicate slums and provide decent housing to all citizens.
In January 2022, Morocco’s Minister of Housing Fatima-Zahra El Mansouri outlined a new approach to erase Casablanca’s remaining slums.
The population of slums across Morocco grew 5.6% per year between 1992 and 2004, according to the World Bank.
With rapid urbanization and the increase in the number of people in cities throughout the years, many families opted to live in slums, especially those who are facing unemployment and struggling financially.
In 2004, King Mohammed VI launched the “Cities Without Slums” program in the wake of the 2003 Casablanca terrorist attacks, when 12 suicide bombers from the shanty town of Sidi Moumen, a poor suburb of Casablanca, killed 45 people and injured hundreds more.
The program aims to ensure decent housing for low-income Moroccan families.
In January 2021, the Ministry for Planning and Urban Policy relaunched the “Cities Without Slums” program’s to rehouse around 22,000 households for the benefit of nearly 100,000 people in the Skhirat-Temara area within a period of less than three years.
