Morocco New Higher Education Institution to Offer Degrees in RE

A higher education institution is set to begin in Morocco aiming to provide an education on new market trends, including renewable energy.

Africans are finding it difficult to continue studies after high school at internationally recognized educational facilities. Noureddine Mouaddib, a native Moroccan who left his country over 30 years ago to continue his university studies in France, said: "In the global South, as soon as you graduate from high school, you wonder: Where will I go? Canada, France?" He continued, "If you look at world rankings, there isn’t a single internationally visible university in Africa, with the exception of South Africa."

In 2005, he envisioned the creation of the first global research university in Morocco, and undertook a feasibility study. He campaigned with government officials, colleagues, and other Moroccans. Next month, the International University of Rabat will welcome its first 200 students with classes being held in temporary offices. The campus is expected to be completed by 2015, and the university plans to have 280 faculty members and 5,000 students enrolled by 2020.

The university is a public-private partnership with King Mohammed VI donating 20 hectares in a new technology park outside Rabat. The main investors contributing over one-third of the university’s planned five-year budget of about $130 million include two pension funds: one French-run and the other operated by the Moroccan government.

The curriculum will focus on the government’s development plans as well as emerging sectors including renewable energy in correlation to Morocco’s commitment to develop local sources of alternative energy, mainly dealing with wind and solar. The establishment of this university could double the number of university students in the North African country from the current total of 300,000. Rabat‘s corporate research partners include the engineering giant Siemens AG, with Morocco’s Ministry of Energy set to finance a €5-million project to increase the efficiency of solar cells.

"We won’t produce super-high-tech products," Mouaddib explains. "We’ll work on products that meet the needs of the local, of the African, market. In other words, inexpensive innovations." The engineering department has already patented three alternative-energy devices including a wind turbine that will function even with very weak breezes; a light panel that shuts off automatically when it detects other sources of light; and a solar-powered water heater.

A literature professor at Yale University, Mokhtar Ghambou, said that his decision to help shape the university’s humanities department was a calling. He said, "At a certain point you feel nostalgia. You start to wonder, what can I do for my native country? To think about what you can contribute."

Marcia C. Inhorn, a professor of anthropology and international affairs and chair of the Council of Middle East Studies at Yale, visited Rabat last year in a delegation led by Ghambou. She said the university hopes to collaborate with “promising partner institutions” in the region. In addition, Yale is looking to host a university exchange with students and faculty members. "Moroccan-American relations are being strengthened as well, and [the Council of Middle East Studies] wants to be a part of this hopeful moment," she writes. "Yale is currently in a major process of internationalization/globalization, and the Middle East is near the top of its lists of priority areas,” Inhorn said.

The university hopes that at least 20% of its student body will come from sub-Saharan Africa. And it wants to offer opportunities to deserving students of limited means. It will give academic scholarships, covering the yearly tuition to one-fifth of its students, as well as help them get bank loans to cover living expenses.

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