Ten years after the protests of the 20 February Movement, Morocco's ‘Arab Spring’ moment, demonstrations still take place almost daily across the kingdom on a range of issues. From the unemployed graduates to the miners of Jerada, from the contractual teachers to the Soulaliyate women demanding land rights, from the Mediterranean to the Sahara, social unrest is largely driven by a lack of social justice and/or secure economic opportunities (Rachidi, 2019).

Across North Africa, the youth demographic is the widest and yet the most economically excluded. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO, 2017), ‘Reduced economic activity rates (youth leaving or postponing their entry into the labour market), under-employment (working below one's qualifications or fewer hours than one would wish to), increased precarity and informal work are […] dominant characteristics of the lives at work of North Africa's youth.’ Furthermore, the better educated a Moroccan job seeker is, the more likely s/he is to be unemployed (Chraibi, 2019). Graduate unemployment has hovered around 25–30 per cent for decades across North Africa (World Bank, n.d., ‘Fact Sheet’). The availability of public sector jobs-for-life which absorbed the graduates of previous generations is much reduced in a contracted, neoliberal state, yet the knowledge and skills acquired in Morocco's state universities are not relevant in an increasingly globalised marketplace. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF, 2016, p. 13), ‘Education quality and skill mismatches are widely recognized as impediments to the youth population gaining a foothold in the labour market.’

A 2017 joint report by Morocco's High Commission for Planning (Haut Commissariat de Plan; HCP) in collaboration with the World Bank, entitled ‘Labour Market in Morocco: Challenges and Opportunities’, highlighted three challenges preventing Morocco from harvesting its demographic dividend. These were: (1) a lack of inclusion, (2) slow job creation and (3) the low quality of jobs. Taking each of the three areas highlighted by the HCP/World Bank report in turn, this chapter highlights a number of case studies of practical and successful initiatives which have been undertaken in sub-Saharan economies and which could be adapted to the Moroccan situation to help reap a demographic dividend and avoid the consequences of a dividend left to wither on the vine, to continue the agricultural analogy.