Economics & Development

Morocco’s coastal zones and associated marine environments form the backbone of Morocco’s economy. They face numerous threats including urbanization, pollution, resource depletion, and climate-related risks such as drought and sea-level rise. Coastal degradation and climate change endanger the livelihoods of millions of people dependent on fisheries, tourism, and agriculture. The threats to coastal and marine ecosystems have been exacerbated by sectoral activities working in isolation from each other, often with conflicting objectives. By 2012, the government of Morocco had already taken several steps to strengthen integrated coastal zone management (ICZM). Building on these steps, the World Bank’s ICZM Project was designed to pilot the ICZM approach in targeted areas along Morocco’s Mediterranean coast in the east. This Project Performance Assessment Report forms part of a cluster assessment of three World Bank projects that has informed the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) evaluation Making Waves: World Bank Support for the Blue Economy, 2012–23. This assessment offers the following lessons: (i) The use of small pilot projects to demonstrate the benefits of ICZM can be an effective starting point to overcome resistance from different sectors and resource users, catalyze investment, and create buy-in for ICZM at the policy level. (ii) Small-scale ICZM projects are unlikely to achieve lasting benefits without sustainable funding, continuous adaptation, and wider efforts to address rapid, large scale changes occurring in coastal areas. (iii) Livelihoods subprojects may require deeper analysis of markets as well as support to create market linkages to produce viable economic enterprises. (iv) Results frameworks that do not measure environmental, economic, and social outcomes will fail to capture the mutual benefits resulting from ICZM approaches.

The development objective of Improving Mental Health Services Project in Sint Maarten is to improve the capacity of mental health service delivery in Sint Maarten. This restructuring requires an additional financing of two million US dollars to close the ten million financing gap in the original scope of Component 2 of the project, with the Government of Sint Maarten (GoSXM) committing to providing the additional eight million in counterpart funding. It also requires the following changes: (a) adjust Component costing; (b) update the disbursement condition associated with C2.2; (c) establish a dated legal covenant for the signing of a Lease Agreement between the NRPB, GoSXM, and MHF; (d) add a dated legal covenant for the amendment of the Subsidiary Agreement (to be renamed Implementation Agreement) to be entered between MHF and NRPB; (e) make slight revisions of the PDO and IRI indicators that refer to the new mental health building; (f) revise the disbursement estimates to reflect the proposed AF of US$2 million; and (h) revise the definition of operating costs. The availability of the counterpart funding is an effectiveness condition for the new AF grant agreement and a condition of disbursement for Category (2) for the purpose of C2.2 under the original financing Grant Agreement.