Routes of Transition in North Africa is a pilot project that explores the black economy in North Africa and the Middle East, starting from Morocco.
Taking an institutional and structural approach, informality is captured as a rational response to rigid labour regulations, complex bureaucracy, and high tax burdens (Aysit, 2022; Lahlou et al., 2020; World Bank, 2019). This dynamic is defined as deeply embedded within the labyrinthine urban morphology of historic medinas like Fes El-Bali, which inherently “obstructs” state surveillance (despite the constant presence of the tourist police) and fiscal regulation, thereby providing an infrastructure for clandestine manufacturing and unregulated trade (Doh Eain and CHiFA, 2022; HCP, 2019; OECD, 2024).
The secretive architecture of the black economy
With this project and the chosen approach, the secretive architecture of the black economy in challenging medinas has been explored, alongside the environmentally related and dependent factors that incentivise informality in Morocco.
Architecture reflects black market businesses, which is most evident in the complexities of the old city of Fes El-Bali, where further discrepancies have also emerged. Similarly, urban and architectural changes are taking place in the city of Rabat, where Mediterranean influences dominate the predominantly white-painted medina.
Despite this, informality in the medina remains heavily concentrated. Sectors are not dominated by gender, as the team observed activities running late at night where the divide between men and women was absent, a finding confirmed in interviews conducted in Rabat.
Mainly in the city of Fes, in opposition to Meknes, dominated by Farms and thus agriculture, the narrowest streets in the ancient medina intersect with the economic urbanism of the UNESCO site, and activities are run mainly at night in extremely precarious venues, which additionally pose issues of toxicity and thus health. In Meknes, the agricultural sector and its associated agro-industrial operations account for approximately 50% of Meknes’s localised economic activity and absorb 43.5% of the regional workforce (HCP, 2024; CRI Fès-Meknès, 2025).
In Fes, instead, the toxicity is not unilaterally worker-related, but also community-oriented, as contaminated water from tanneries flows into the Fes River, which, despite treatments, poses an epidemiological threat to the land.
The economic and societal mechanisms, as well as the political challenges underpinning the micro-dynamics and micro-challenges of the black market, its workforce, its expansion, and its bureaucratic challenges have been explored through interviews, also with key profiles, and documented in the visual material produced.
This material highlights informal architecture and precariousness, farms and agriculture, water, and women-led cooperatives, all of which are expanding across the country, as evidenced by fieldwork and interviews with Targa-Aide in Rabat, despite bureaucratic challenges. A few stories were produced out of the gathered material, as part of this pilot project, which evidenced that entrepreneurship is gender-driven in the sense that there is a diffused approach to women-led cooperatives operating at the intersection of the first and third sectors.
This project also gives identity and voice to workers in the informal economy, including women of all ages, who make up a significant percentage in the country. In the agricultural sector, women serve as “shock absorbers”, meaning they are the first to be hired during periods of growth and the first to be made redundant during crises, as confirmed by interviews with farmers in the area outside Meknes.
When employed, there are currently no mechanisms for temporary or seasonal social protection. The only way they manage to survive is through solidarity and barter with neighbouring farms.
Thus, the project examines the role and impact of water in the informal economy and the challenges faced by the agricultural sector, which is highly informal and currently exposed to insecurity caused by water scarcity, while also being highly political. Similarly, water is not considered profane; in certain contexts and sectors beyond agriculture, it retains its cultural-religious sacrality, as in the Muslim faith, and its significance as a material means of life and existence, such as in the old tanneries of the city of Fes, which date back to the Punic and Phoenician eras. In these cases, the connection between water and identity, despite health risks posed by the sector due to chemical components, is sacralised and informally nationalised.
An ethnopolitical-ethnographic approach
This SOAS University of London-based pilot project has, for the first time, explored the mechanisms of the black economy in Morocco, taking an ethnopolitical-ethnographic approach grounded in the trajectories and implications of sustainable development programmes and the Agenda 2030 goals. However, this approach does not transcend the strictly political and economic mechanisms at the core of knowledge production on the inner mechanisms sustaining economic informality. It examines how these programmes of development intersect with political transformations, the institutionalisation of solutions to informality to contain it, the support for and structural barriers to the cooperative model, and the diversification of the black economy in Morocco, where informality is highly varied between the north, centre, and south. This differentiation is also cultural, as discussed with the Targa-Aide Director in Rabat.
As Morocco accelerates urban development with a model inspired by landscape modernisation that centralises the idea of green spaces and the relevance of sustainability, the gap between “identity” and socioeconomic insecurity widens, revealing a friction between the paradigm of “identity and symbols” and development. These top-down transformations are powered by massive capital injections from the Gulf Cooperation Council, with total investments exceeding 30 billion USD. The United Arab Emirates’ presence has solidified its position as Morocco’s top foreign direct investor, channelling billions into large-scale real estate developments and signing a landmark 14 billion USD infrastructure and green energy pact. In Rabat’s real estate market, these funds finance premium waterfront revitalisations. However, while these flagship initiatives redesign the visible landscape, there will be no reduction in carbon footprints, and thus no sustainable transition, without effective solutions for the deeply entrenched informal sectors operating just beyond these modernised perimeters.
About Routes of Transition in North Africa
This pilot project represents a novelty both for the rationale and approach taken, in the way the discourse on black economies is kept separately from different approaches that have enquired into taxation aspects.
Fieldwork has identified a lack of knowledge regarding the nexus between “hydrosociality” and empowerment
The informal economy in Morocco is closely linked to environmental challenges, particularly water scarcity and its management, but it is also an economic, social, and political issue. This project is timely, focusing on the intersectionality between the informal sector, the politics of water in Morocco and development. The fieldwork has identified a lack of knowledge regarding the nexus between “hydrosociality” and empowerment, specifically how to bridge the gap to support the transition from the informal to a more sustainable and inclusive formal economy, and whether and how water can act as a catalyst.
The fieldwork identified a lack of empirical knowledge about the structure of areas where the informal sector is expanding, the context of the actors and women involved, and the connection between water management and the informal economy in these areas. This project aims (i) to enable the collection of preliminary and visual data on the informal sector and the water nexus in Morocco’s key selected cities of Fes, Meknes and Rabat.
The approach taken by institutions differs between the north, the south, and the centre. The inclusion of women in cooperatives is not culturally determined, as a significant proportion of workers and entrepreneurs of all ages are women; the main barriers remain structural, according to key profiles in Rabat. Women-led cooperatives are involved in the agricultural sector, but are also related to arts and crafts, mainly in the central area of the country
