Mohamed Charef, director of the Regional Observatory of Migration Spaces and Societies (ORMES) of the University Ibn Zohr of Agadir, Ana Fonseca, head of mission of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Morocco and Issiaka Konaté, director general of Ivorians Abroad, took part in this initiative moderated by Ms Najat Azmy, member of the Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad (CCME) and the National Council for Diversity in France.

The interventions of the participants focused on three key points, namely the importance of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on migrants and the progress in the governance of Morocco on the matter of migration in the Kingdom.

Mr Issiaka Konate said:” the commemoration of International Migrants Day is an opportunity to dispel several misperceptions. He quotes the speech of His Majesty King Mohammed VI saying "80% of the migratory flow takes place within the continent. The statistics are very clear, only 10% of migrants go to Europe. Migration is mostly regular and only 15% of international migration is irregular".

Moreover, migrants spend 85% of their income in the host countries, which means that "migration contributes more to the wealth of the host countries than to that of the countries of origin, as one might think".

He also said he was pleased to see the African Migration Observatory based in Morocco. "Today we are involved in a work that commits all of us”.

For her part, Anna Fonseca said: "without any doubt, migration is an opportunity for humanity ". Based on her years of experience within the UN organization, she explained that in Morocco, "as a country of transit and destination, we see that mobility is a concept that must be integrated into sectoral policies, because there is a close link between mobility and development".

"Morocco is making big efforts in the perspective of local governance of the migratory phenomenon and above all to benefit from mobility on a territorial level". She highlighted the mechanisms implemented to achieve these objectives, namely the Global compact initiative and the national immigration and asylum strategy.

The UN official also states that "if it is important to take care of vulnerable categories, we must work even more on resilience together, African and European countries, must unite our efforts to develop mechanisms for the recognition of competences and for employability in mobility".

In this sense, she believes that the role of the African Migration Observatory will help to "contextualize" efforts and support African states in collecting and analyzing of data, "which is important for the governance of migration in Africa but also at the level of all states that are stakeholders in this mobility".

For Anna Fonseca, the covid-19 pandemic had an inclusive aspect. It impact reveals the need to unite our efforts, to express solidarity and humanism and have empathy towards the migrant who found himself, with the brutal closure of borders, in the position of an invisible victim.

Covid 19 has increased the vulnerability of already weakened categories and broadened the base of this population. "This context should motivate us to develop strategic partnerships between public, institutional and private actors for sectoral development so that this category does not become even larger and we must now consider mobility in an epidemiological context".

In his speech, Mohamed Charef outlined the objectives of the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families of 18 December 1990, the most important of which is to set standards that the various States must use as a basis for establishing their laws and for strengthening the legal arsenal on the issue of migrants' rights.

The convention, of which "Morocco has always been one of the milestones", has, to date, been ratified by 55 countries, including most French-speaking African countries, most Latin American countries, while in Europe only Albania has done so. "This is the road ahead of us”.

According to Mr Charef, Morocco's commitment to migration can be seen in the extraordinary progress it has made under the impetus of royal directives and national strategies that must be even more concrete and more "territorialized".

"His Majesty presented a clear roadmap that gave rise to the African Migration Observatory, a godsend for the continent because if we want to govern migration and migrants, we must know them through our tools and institutions, not through those imported from other countries that live in other realities".

For Professor Charef, the keyword of our time is the globalization of mobility. The diaspora, which constitutes 3.4% of the world population, contributes 9.5% of the world GDP, so "yes, migration is an opportunity, even in times of crisis, when we know that two Covid-19 vaccines have been developed by migrants”.

Covid-19, a virus which has propelled the world into an unprecedented crisis and which, for Moroccan migrants in a difficult situation, "only revealed a reality which was already disastrous. They were in the front lines, mainly in the service sector. They also suffered because of their housing conditions, since the whole world was under house arrest and because they could not mourn the human losses in their ranks due to the scarcity of Muslim squares and the impossibility of transferring the remains to Morocco ».

CCME