Morocco launches national AI and digital skills programme for children
The government of Morocco is rolling out a nationwide programme to equip children with digital and AI skills as part of its drive to spur innovation.
Launched at a ceremony in Tangier, the National Program for Children in the Fields of Digital and Artificial Intelligence has also been designed to help close the digital divide.
The programme is part of the Digital Morocco 2030 national strategy, which aspires to make the country a leader in Africa in the use of digital technology for sustainable and equitable development.
Present for the launch ceremony was Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, the country’s minister in charge of digital transition and administration reform, and Mohammed Mehdi Bensaid, Morocco’s minister of youth, culture, and communication.
Seghrouchni said that the programme would use accessible and intuitive educational materials and stressed that the technologies used in the programme would be safe and ethical.
She emphasised that the goal was to secure Morocco’s future as a “producer of digital” rather than solely a consumer of it.
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First phase begins
The programme started as a strategic partnership framework forged between the country’s Ministry of Digital Transition and Administration Reform, the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication, the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University’s International Center for Artificial Intelligence, under the supervision of UNESCO.
The first phase of the programme has been rolled out to 12 cities across Morocco.
To support the educational programme, 65 youth facilitators have been trained to work with children in the current phase. The programme will later be expanded to all youth centres across the country.
Speaking at the Global Government Finance Summit in 2023, the head of the finance ministry in Morocco, Noureddine Bensouda, called digital transformation a “game changer” for government, along with efforts to foster sustainability.
Bensouda, who is the general treasurer of the Kingdom of Morocco, said that the development of digital technologies provided “broad opportunities for positive transformation of the economy and the society”, though warned that currently, they were “changing faster than our capacity to adapt”. As a result, he added that digital technologies had the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities.
About Jack Aldane
Jack is a British journalist, cartoonist and podcaster. He graduated from Heythrop College London in 2009 with a BA in philosophy, before living and working in China for three years as a freelance reporter. After training in financial journalism at City University from 2013 to 2014, Jack worked at Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters before moving into editing magazines on global trade and development finance. Shortly after editing opinion writing for UnHerd, he joined the independent think tank ResPublica, where he led a media campaign to change the health and safety requirements around asbestos in UK public buildings. As host and producer of The Booking Club podcast – a conversation series featuring prominent authors and commentators at their favourite restaurants – Jack continues to engage today’s most distinguished thinkers on the biggest problems pertaining to ideology and power in the 21st century. He joined Global Government Forum as its Senior Staff Writer and Community Co-ordinator in 2021.
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