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MOU between Israel, Morocco will enable collaboration in drinking water, liquid sanitation
November 17, 2022
The signing took place during the Global Investment Forum 2022.
On Thursday, a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between Morocco’s National Office for Electricity and Drinking Water (ONEE) and Israel’s national water company Mekorot. The signing, which took place during the Global Investment Forum 2022, will establish a framework for the development of cooperation between the two institutions in the areas of drinking water and liquid sanitation.
The agreement, which was signed by Mekorot chairman Yitzhak Aharonovitz and ONEE general director Abderrahim El Hafidi, will enable the two companies to work together to promote joint cooperation activities in the fields of seawater desalination, performance improvement, water sanitation, digital systems management, R&D and innovation.
Joint cooperation activities between the two countries
The collaboration between the two countries’ water authorities is a drop in the bucket of their widespread business collaboration resulting from the 2020 Abraham Accords. Since then, numerous deals, investments and agreements have been made between the two nations’ business sectors.
“The Accords have opened new and fascinating business opportunities and horizons for [Mekorot], and it intends to fulfill those opportunities with an abundance of solutions for the water economies of neighboring [and] distant countries,” said Mekorot CEO Amit Lang.
Morocco stands to benefit greatly from Israel’s innovations in water technology. The country is facing local water shortages and many of its rural areas suffer from poor water sanitation. “We have more than 32,000 villages in Morocco without access to safe sanitation, and more than 14 million people in Morocco still [pour] their wastewater directly into rivers,” said Salma Bougarrani, co-founder and CEO of Green Watech, a Moroccan organization dedicated to developing and promoting accessible water sanitation solutions throughout the country.
“There is a huge opportunity to work on rural sanitation and decentralized sanitation, but also to find low tech solutions to democratize this kind of solution in rural areas in Morocco,” she said.
Thursday’s signing follows a similar MOU agreement which took place in December 2020 between the Kingdom of Morocco, represented by the Ministry of Equipment and Water; and the State of Israel, represented by the Ministry of Water Resources.