An ambitious program is increasingly connecting remote Moroccan villages to potable water sources, and its latest phase helped more than one million rural citizens to have access to clean water, ensuring them a healthier life.
“The benefits of bringing clean drinking water to Morocco’s most remote areas are clear—it reduces the burden of disease from unclean water and saves residents time wasted fetching water from distant locations,” explains Carolina Dominguez-Torres, a Senior Water and Sanitation Specialist at the World Bank.
In 1995, Morocco launched the PAGER program to get potable water to rural douars – what Moroccan villages are called – to address the fact that only 14% of the country’s remote population had access to safe drinking water. Since 2005, the World Bank is supporting the PAGER program through a series of projects. The latest phase of the Rural Water Supply project was launched in 2014, and as of March 2023, more than 1.1 million citizens spread across 2,000 douars in the most remote areas – along the Atlantic coast and in Rif and Pré-Rif regions – have been connected, either through standpipes or individual household connections, to safe water supplies. Through the project’s main goal to improve the population’s quality of life, it also created jobs for more than 2,000 local standpipe caretakers.
