Lead Organization

The World Bank.

Partners

Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR), Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, Swiss Secretariat for Economic Affairs.

Challenges

• Risk management traditionally has been conducted in “silos” preventing more integrated strategy development and decision making processes.
• Not enough financial resources, including from development finance, are devoted to ex ante risk prevention (as opposed to ex post risk response).

Program Objective

• In the context of a new World Bank lending project that is currently being prepared, to provide strategic advice to the Government of Morocco on global risk management practices.
• To share proactively Morocco’s risk management vision with other countries in the MENA Region and beyond.  

Selected Results

• Informed policy choice/strategy: The provision of high-quality policy advice on risk management led to the Government of Morocco’s commitment to scale up risk management activities by reforming its natural disaster risk prevention fund. The next generation of the fund will be financed by a proposed new World Bank PforR (program for results) lending operation.
• Public debate/stakeholder involvement: The organization of a high-profile event to disseminate a World Development Report, Risk and Opportunity: Managing Risk for Development, held in Rabat in November 2013 led to increased awareness among senior policy makers and the general public in Morocco of global risk management trends.
• Deepened knowledge (dissemination of best practices): A presentation, Morocco’s Risk Management Experience and Vision, was showcased at a Center for Mediterranean Integration (CMI) Urbanization Knowledge Platform workshop on city resilience held in Marseille in May 2014. About 70 representatives and risk management practitioners from MENA, Europe, the United States, Latin America, and East Asia convened to discuss risk management and city resilience. Representatives included mayors and vice-mayors from 15 cities and 13 countries (among them Algiers, Amman, Beirut, Bizerte, Djibouti City, Hebron, Jeddah, Sfax, and Venice). A Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) flagship conference on understanding risk held in London in July 2014 has also led to increased global awareness of Morocco’s innovative risk management work.