Moroccan women are outpacing much of Africa when it comes to education and access to digital tools — yet they still lag behind Moroccan men on jobs, ownership, and financial autonomy. That’s the layered picture emerging from a new Afrobarometer survey, as reported by Moroccan outlet Hespress.
An educated, connected majority
According to the survey, roughly 57 percent of Moroccan women have completed secondary or higher education, 24 percent have primary schooling, and about 18 percent have no formal education at all. Education, however, is heavily generational: women aged 18 to 35 account for 81 percent of those with at least a secondary-level qualification, while women over 55 represent just 18 percent of that group — a clear sign of how dramatically access to schooling has shifted within a single lifetime.
The digital picture is even more striking. Some 97 percent of urban Moroccan women and 92 percent of rural Moroccan women own a mobile phone — well above the averages of 90 percent and 73 percent, respectively, recorded across the 38 other African countries surveyed. Financial inclusion, however, lags behind: 58 percent of urban women in the kingdom say they hold a bank account.
The gender gap that hasn’t closed
Even with those gains, Afrobarometer’s data shows Moroccan women remain less likely than men to hold paid employment and to own key assets — cars and motorcycles, financial assets such as bank accounts and mobile money accounts, and digital tools like phones and computers.
The survey frames this within a broader continental context. Women have been at the heart of African development policy for decades, reflected in the core goals of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and increasingly written into everything from national development plans to the founding texts of the African Continental Free Trade Area.
That focus has produced modest progress over the past decade, both globally and in Africa. But the pace remains slow and uneven: the Gender Equality Index shows African women still enjoy only about half the social, economic, and political opportunities available to men.
The rural-urban divide
Some of the sharpest inequalities the survey identifies are not between men and women, but between women themselves.
Obstacles are particularly severe for women in villages — precisely the group, Afrobarometer notes, that could act as key drivers of economic development. Yet most initiatives designed to track women’s progress overlook the substantive differences between the experiences, challenges, and successes of rural and urban women, which can be quite distinct. For many rural women, limited access to basic infrastructure and services amplifies time constraints and restricts their ability to tap into the information and opportunities needed to unlock their full potential.
Gaps between women and men in urban areas, the survey observes, are sometimes far smaller than those separating urban from rural women.
A surprising bright spot
The report ends on an unexpected note. Rural Moroccan women, it finds, actually outperform their urban counterparts in several key aspects of political participation — a level of civic engagement Afrobarometer suggests could be leveraged as a mechanism to amplify rural women’s voices and to accelerate and broaden change in rural communities.
In other words: the women often assumed to be furthest from the levers of power may in fact be the ones most ready to use them.
