Morocco's Employment Paradox: What If Our Youth Are Not Refusing Work, but a Certain Idea of Work?

The Moroccan labour market is telling two opposite stories in the same sentence. On one side, 1.621 million unemployed, a national rate of 13%, and a rate climbing to 38.4% among 15-24 year-olds in Q3 2025 according to the High Commission for Planning. On the other side, construction firms reporting up to 50% shortages on certain profiles in some regions, and housing projects slowing down by 40% due to a lack of manpower, as the National Federation of Real Estate Developers has warned.

The country has too many unemployed and too few hands at the same time. Numbers alone cannot explain this paradox. It is explained by a deep shift in values and representations that few analyses dare to name.

What the numbers say

• National unemployment in 2025: 13%, or 1.621 million people (HCP).
• Youth aged 15-24: 37.2% on annual average, up to 38.4% in Q3 2025.
• Graduates: 19.1%.
• Women: 20.5%.
• Construction sector in 2025: 64,000 net jobs created, with an official target of 70,000 jobs per year by 2030 (Ministry of Economic Inclusion).
• Construction wages: +30% in one year, with labour now representing 25% of contractors' revenue, up from 18%.

Once aligned, these numbers make one thing obvious: the problem is not a lack of jobs, it is a mismatch between supply and demand, and even more so between the real opportunities and the image young people have of them.

The invisible cultural rupture

In my view, what is at stake here goes beyond economics. Today's Moroccan youth no longer relates to work the way the youth of 1995 or 2005 did. This generation is globalised, connected, constantly exposed to narratives of fast success, digital freelancing, entrepreneurship, e-commerce. It compares its daily life to what scrolls past on TikTok and Instagram, where no one films a construction site at 6 a.m.

Three ruptures explain the misalignment:

1. Image rupture — manual, technical, and field jobs are perceived as "small jobs", without prestige or clear future, despite wages that jumped 30%.
2. Projection rupture — a young graduate often prefers staying a year unemployed waiting for a position "worthy of their degree" rather than accepting work they consider below their qualifications. HCP itself flags a growing share of overqualification relative to available posts.
3. Effort rupture — the value of work-as-effort is losing ground to an expectation of fast results, native to the attention economy.

What employers are not saying enough

Employers are not innocent in this equation. Many still offer conditions from another era: contractual precariousness, weak social coverage, few prospects of advancement, old-school management. When a young person compares an undeclared fixed-term contract paying 4,500 dirhams on a construction site with a remote freelance video-editing gig, the calculation is quickly done — even if the second is unstable.

So the problem is not that young people refuse to work. The problem is that the work currently on offer no longer matches the aspirations of a generation that globalised faster than its own economy did.

Four levers to close the gap

• Massively revalue jobs in tension through awareness campaigns carried by credible figures, real testimonies, and visible career paths.
• Certify the skills of experienced craftsmen via Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), turning informal know-how into recognised, valued competence.
• Redesign employment conditions: social coverage, hardship bonuses, mobility support, continuous training, concrete career prospects.
• Align training with real demand: fewer saturated tracks with no outlets, more short, targeted programmes for jobs where companies are actually hiring.

Morocco does not just have an unemployment problem. It has a mismatch problem between a youth that has changed and an economy that has not kept up. Until this diagnosis is made plainly, public policies will keep treating symptoms while missing the disease.