Morocco

The legal framework analysis aims to provide general knowledge of the national cooperative legislation and of its main characteristics and contents, with particular regard to those aspects of regulation regarding the identity of cooperatives and its distinction from other types of business organisations, notably the for-profit shareholder corporation.

It aims to evaluate whether the national legislation in place supports or hampers the development of cooperatives, and is therefore “cooperative friendly” or not, and the degree to which it may be considered so, also in comparison to the legislation in force in other countries of the ICA region, or at the supranational level.

In addition, the research aims to provide recommendations for eventual renewal of the legal frameworks in place in order to understand what changes in the current legislation would be necessary to improve its degree of “cooperative friendliness”, which is to say, to make the legislation more favourable to cooperatives, also in consideration of their specific identity. This webpage presents a snapshot of the legal framework analysis results for Morocco.

In Morocco, cooperatives are regulated by law 112-12 on cooperatives of November 21, 2014. There are also other texts regulating housing cooperatives, mining cooperatives, the national federation of cooperatives and agrarian reform cooperatives.

The main regulations can be summarized as follows:

Law 112-12 on cooperatives - All cooperatives are subject to this law, with the exception of agrarian reform cooperatives

Royal Decree No. 552-67 of December 17, 1968 - Relative to land credit, constitution credit and concerns housing cooperatives

Law 74-15 promulgated on August 25, 2016 - It concerns the procedure for obtaining the authorization to mine mineral deposits

Dahir n ° 1-58-376 of November 15, 1958 regulating the right of association - This law concerns the constitution and the functioning of the national federation of cooperatives, For the missions they are mentioned at the level of the law 112-12

Dahir bearing law n ° 1-72-277 of December 29, 1972 - Relating to the allocation to farmers of agricultural land in the private domain of the State

 

Cooperative friendliness

For the Office for the Development of Cooperation (ODCO), a member of the International Cooperative Alliance, Law 112-12 is suitable for the Moroccan cooperative movement and has many characteristics, including:
Simplification of the creation procedure, Reduction of the number of members from 7 to 5, Abolition of the approval prior to the exercise, submission to public procurement, and possibility for cooperatives to become a company.
There remains a problem and an issue related to co-operative financing because banks treat cooperatives as any private enterprise in financing their projects, hence the importance of thinking about creating a cooperative bank.

Key recommendations for improvement

In order for national cooperative legislation to be more appropriate for cooperative development, recommendations need to focus on the following:
Mandatory requirement for a feasibility study, Remuneration of board members, the supervisory committee must be mandatory, the establishment of a 2% reserve called the Education and Training Fund.

Conclusions

It is important that the cooperatives in Morocco are all subject to law 112-12 including the agrarian reform cooperatives. It is also necessary to train decision-makers and legislators to enable them to understand the specificity of cooperatives. Consequently, it is necessary to revise article 102 to reinforce the attributions of ODCO and its financial and human resources and to envisage an annual subsidy for the national federation of the cooperatives.

_{The legal frameworks analysis is a tool developed under the ICA-EU Partnership #coops4dev. It is an overview of the national legal frameworks at the time of writing. The views expressed within are not necessarily those of the ICA, nor does a reference to any specific content constitute an explicit endorsement or recommendation by the ICA.}