King Mohammed pledges to consolidate regionalization
Morocco, Politics, 11/7/2001

Morocco's King Mohammed VI on Tuesday renewed the pledge to consolidate regionalization and adopt an integrated development approach to promote the region.

"We are resolved to consolidate regionalization and adopt a regional integrated development approach by virtue of which each region will not be restricted to its own administrative, institutional and cultural structures and dimensions but will constitute, instead, a space propitious to integrated development and evolving in synergy with the region and for the region," said King Mohammed VI in a speech he delivered Tuesday evening on the occasion of the 26th anniversary of the Green March.

The sovereign said this approach would start with the Southern and Northern Regions of the Kingdom, and would take into account these regions' respective specificities, in the frame of regional integrated development plans.

After he surveyed the various economic and social projects carried out in the Saharan provinces since they were retrieved by Morocco in 1975 (construction of roads, ports, airports, housing units and schools, supply of water and electricity, promotion of communication and telecommunication infrastructures, creation of enterprises.), the sovereign said the development plan for the Moroccan Saharan provinces will be founded up basically on "the promotion of the sea fisheries sector, the rational tapping of mineral wealth, handicraft, tourism and stock breeding." ."Education, training, culture and environment will enjoy all the interest they deserve, still in synergy with economic development and youth employment and in the perspective of extending our trade exchanges with our neighbors and brothers, in Mauritania and other African neighboring countries," he went on.

King Mohammed VI pointed out that he would personally supervise the drafting of the integrated development plan for the Saharan provinces and that he would see to it that this process be subjected to wide and transparent consultation with the population of the region, through all its elected councils, its youth, its potentials, its associations and its intellectual and social elite.

He said he would also see to it that this plan be not limited to a mere listing of theoretical projects and decisions, that it enjoy financing means, instruments for implementation and mechanisms for continuous assessment and that it be a model of regional integrated development.

The sovereign insisted that Morocco will resolutely carry on its march to secure global development to its Saharan provinces, founding this march on democracy in its largest meaning and enforcing the highest degree of regionalization, decentralization and devolution, and stressed the need to "build a Morocco where all the various regions constitute dynamic spaces for sustained development, local democracy practice, cultural specificity promotion, and economic and social prosperity materialization, in the frame of unity and solidarity."

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