How Morocco deals with informal settlements? The assessment of “Cities without Slums Program” in eradicating informal settlements in urban zones of Morocco

“Villes Sans Bidonvilles” (VSB) or “Cities without Slums” is a development project aims to eradicate slums from 85 Moroccan cities initiated by the government of Morocco in 2004, in an attempt to reduce social exclusion, as well as to lessen the chance of homegrown violent extremism in urban zones. The initiative consists of three strategies that were pursued in phases: phase (i) was upgrading, phase (ii) was rehousing and phase (iii) was resettlement. Some views hold that this government initiative is the first personal engagement of Morocco in the country’s poverty reduction plan. In 2018, as a result of the program, the Kingdom of Morocco declared 58 of 85 cities across the country as slum-free despite another two million Moroccans still live in some form of informal housing. UN Habitat and other multilateral agencies including the World Bank have declared “Villes Sans Bidonvilles” a grand success and heralded the program as a replicable and scalable model for other governments in the region. The proposed work aims to assess how the program (VSB) has assisted the Moroccan government to reduce informal settlements in urban zones. To this end, this work will mainly focus on the secondary data, including the up-to-date annual and regular reports, published especially by the World Bank, African Development Bank, United Nations, UN Habitat, and the Moroccan Ministry of Housing, using three languages, namely, English, Arabic, and French. This proposed work will allow us to shed light on the on-going controversy regarding the effectiveness and challenges facing the new strategies aimed at eradicating slums in developing countries.