African Intermediary Cities as Actors and Partners in Urban Migration Governance (Oujda, Morocco)
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. Located close to the Algerian border (13 km) and the Mediterranean Sea (60 km), the city is an important hub for rural-urban, interregional and international mixed migration. Both the regional council and the municipality of Oujda have set up administrative migration units and address migration and development in their local and regional development plans. In addition, a wide range of other actors are directly and indirectly involved in mixed migration in the city. In order to gain 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 Oujda municipality and the NGO Coaching Territorial in September 2022. The stakeholder mapping shows that although public and civil society actors are addressing mixed migration issues 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 local, regional and national governments. Despite the need for improvement, the project identified several good practice examples of multi-stakeholder action, such as the Oujda Migration Network.
