Equal Partnerships – African Intermediary Cities as Actors and Partners in Urban Migration Governance

Partnerships in Oujda, Morocco

2023

Janina Stürner-Siovitz and Lasse Juhl Morthorst

Oujda is an intermediary city in the northeast of Morocco. With a population of approximately 500,000 inhabitants, Oujda serves as the administrative center of the Oriental Region. Situated in close proximity to both the Algerian border (13 km) and the Mediterranean Sea (60 km), the city represents an important hub for rural-urban, inter-regional, and international mixed migration. Both the Regional Council and the municipality of Oujda have established administrative migration units and address migration and development in their local and regional development plans. In addition, a broad range of other actors engage directly and indirectly on mixed migration in the city, including national agencies, local and national NGOs, migrant associations, Oujda university, international organizations, and foreign development agencies. To create an overview of activities, partnerships and cooperation gaps, the Equal Partnerships project developed participatory field research and organized a local workshop in cooperation with the municipality of Oujda and the NGO Coaching Territorial in September 2022. The stakeholder mapping shows that even though public and civil society actors address questions of mixed migration and have created various coordination hubs, there is an urgent need to strengthen cooperation between public and civil society actors at the local level, as well as dialogue between the local, regional, and national governments. Room for improvement notwithstanding, the project identified several good practice examples for multi-stakeholder action such as the Oujda Migration Network. The case study situates Oujda in the national and regional migration context, presents the outcomes of the stakeholder mapping, identifies opportunities and challenges of cooperative action on mixed migration and concludes with concrete policy recommendations for strengthening multi-stakeholder partnerships on urban migration governance.