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Middle East & North Africa
Against FIFA 2030 or Dependent Capitalism? The Thread between GenZ Revolt and Morocco’s Subordination in the Automotive GVC
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Middle East & North Africa
Devalued Money and Depleted Resources: The Ecological Consequences of Monetary Policy in North Africa
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Noria Research
Corona from Below: Field Notes from Everyday Life in Eastern Cameroon During the Covid-19 Pandemic
Introduction
Both the international press and the academy tend to portray Morocco as an economically dynamic country. This framing derives from the country’s alleged successes in pursuing export-oriented growth, with its achievements in catching up with relatively complex sectors such as the automotive industry held up as a key reference point. Morocco’s so-called “upgrading” within global value chains (GVCs[1]) is said to be associated with a process of “emergence”.[2] In most tellings, also expediting that process are ambitious investment projects connected to the 2030 World Cup, which Rabat secured last year together with Madrid and Lisbon. These projects are in keeping with a long-standing pattern of infrastructure and urban modernization initiatives. Though carried out under the leadership of King Mohammed VI since the mid-2000s, such initiatives have been scaled in the period following the 2008 global financial crisis.
The Generation Z protests that erupted on September 27 and continued throughout October 2025 present a frontal challenge to the narratives surrounding Morocco’s developmental achievements. Starting in Agadir, these protests quickly spread across the country. The grievances fueling the mobilization centered on Morocco’s inadequate education and healthcare systems, the declining performances of which were linked to the state’s prioritization of spending on stadiums, highways, and high-speed trains in preparation for the upcoming football competition. Unsurprisingly, the anger of young Moroccans has been directed primarily against Prime Minister Akhannouch and his close associates in the government—a circle of revolving-door businessmen-politicians well connected to the Royal Family.
In observing the protests, some analysts have noted that Morocco would not be the first country to overestimate the economic benefits of hosting major sporting events—the most common reference being Brazil and the 2016 Olympic Games. In many instances, critiques of this type emphasize that corruption among political elites and/or inefficiencies exacerbate tensions between the population’s social welfare needs and expenditures on megaprojects—which could, in principle, serve as drivers of development. Rarer, however, are examinations probing how deeper developmental issues, such as the structural political-economy contradictions, underlie the Generation Z’s protests and their opposition to the 2030 FIFA World Cup.
In view of this lacuna, this article provides a critical account of the growth model pursued by Morocco over recent decades, using an analysis of its integration into the global automotive industry as an analytical prism. The apparent “success story” of the automotive industry may seem disconnected from the problems of poverty and wasteful public spending denounced by the country’s younger generations; we will forward the case that it is in fact closely intertwined with the protestors’ grievances. This becomes visible once Morocco’s GVC upgrading and selection to host the 2030 FIFA World Cup are interpreted as two dimensions of a peripheral and dependent integration into the world capitalist system.[3]
Integration constitutes a long-term path dependency rooted in colonial domination. In more recent times, it has been advanced through the global restructuring of production as well as the acceleration of neoliberal policies and financialization after the 2008 crisis.[4] Historicized thusly, Morocco’s participation to the global automotive industry can be seen to be subordinated to the prerogatives of transnational corporations (TNCs), whose investment strategies not only obstruct a balanced development process but also rely on widespread impoverishment as a condition for securing inexhaustible supplies of cheap labor. Furthermore, the constraints on growth and balance-of-payments equilibria that subordinated integration perpetuates can be shown to have structurally pushed policymakers to implement fiscal measures that guarantee debt-driven megaprojects—projects more functional to attracting international capital inflows than to addressing the needs of the youth and working classes. Cast in this light, Morocco’s automotive boom, World Cup investment push, and the rage of Generation Z come together as a unified phenomenon.
Morocco’s Automotive Success Story: From the Ingress into the Car Exporters’ Club to the Rise of a North African Electric Battery Powerhouse?
Morocco’s automotive sector serves as the flagship of the so-called métiers globaux (global manufacturing) meant to be propelling the country onto the stage of emerging economies. The sector got moving in 2012 when Renault set up assembly operations for Dacia-branded vehicles within the Tangier Free Zone. The next big development was when PSA’s plants began churning in 2019 (PSA was rebranded Stellantis in 2021). Working out of the Kenitra Free Zone, the firm began by manufacturing the Peugeot 208 on Moroccan’s northern Atlantic coast; following a 2025 plant extension, it also assembles FIAT models there.
Today, Morocco’s automotive exports account for almost a quarter of the country’s total gross exports.[5] In terms of volume, the country produced 524,467 automobile units in 2024.[6] This figure is close to those of automotive hubs that have recently benefited from relocation processes in Centre-Eastern Europe, such as Romania. Notably, it exceeds that of more established car industry centers like Italy, which is increasingly focusing on the manufacturing of premium models at expense of mass produced automobiles.
In 2023, with 116 billion dirhams (around 11.6 billion euros) in export sales, Morocco’s automotive industry officially surpassed the hard currency earnings brought in by phosphates and their derivatives, traditionally the country’s most important sources of external income. Figures concerning value added, alas, are less impressive: the sector’s 2023 share of manufacturing GDP—12.5 percent of the total—makes it only the third most important industry after chemicals (mainly phosphate processing) and agri-food. That said, it is worth noting that the auto sector’s share of the manufacturing GDP pie has doubled since 2014, and since 2022, it has exceeded the shares of the textile and clothing industry, historically one of the country’s leading manufacturing segments.
When considering the automotive industry’s employment impact, one should be cautious about the numbers displayed on government websites, which tend to overstate the sector’s contribution. Assuming the good faith of public institutions, the 250,000 workforce reported by the Ministry of Industry likely refer to total annual hires rather than net job creation within a twelve-month period.[7] The figure of 135,000 workers in 2023 provided by the HCP—the national statistics office—for the transport equipment sector therefore offers a more reliable estimate.[8] Even so, it is a remarkable number, more than tripling over the past fifteen years and making the automotive sector the third-largest manufacturing employer in the country, after the agri-food and textile industries.
Driven by foreign investments, the auto industry—inclusive of vehicle assembly and component manufacture—has also become an important source of capital formation and hard currency capital inflows. Over the past decade, FDI in the sector has on average represented 40% of the annual flow of industry-targeting foreign investment. During this period, Morocco has not only joined the relatively exclusive club of car-producing countries but is also carving out a position in innovative activities such as electric batteries (EB) manufacturing. In 2024, a 1 billion euro investment agreement was signed between the Moroccan state and the Chinese multinational Gotion for the construction of a gigafactory in the Kenitra automotive free zone, which is expected to assemble its first cell in June 2026.[9] And at a nearly monthly frequency, the national and international press report new investments in the EB supply chain. In many cases these are memoranda of understanding rather than finalized investment agreements; however, several companies—mainly headquartered in China—are soon expected to start producing anodes and cathodes in Jorf Lasfar and Tangier.[10] In Tangier, the heart of Morocco’s automotive sector, a new section of the Free Zone is presently under construction for the express purpose of attracting firms producing components for Chinese electric vehicle companies.
Chinese investments also seem to be contributing to improving the sector’s value added in more traditional activities. In 2024, Qinghuangdao-headquartered CITIC Dicastal, established in Kenitra since 2018, tripled its production capacity of aluminum wheel rims[11], while in 2025 Sentury, another Chinese TNC, announced the first investment in tire production on Moroccan soil.[12]
The Dust Under the Carpet of Morocco’s Automotive Success Story: Subordination to Transnational Capital, Dispossession, and Labor Exploitation
If the data just surveyed paints an optimistic picture for the auto industry, it is a picture which actually obscures a great deal. In diving into the details, one finds a development story far less inspiriting.
Although finished vehicles account for almost 60% of total automotive production and exports, the bulk of the value chain consists of labor-intensive and low–value-added activities such as the assembly of electric parts—most notably wire harnesses—and textile components for car interiors (Figure 1). By consequence, the auto sector’s contributions to the productivity of the labor force are relatively low. In 2024, consider that the automotive sector’s productivity was only slightly higher than what was observed in relatively low-tech manufacturing industries such as food processing: Value added per worker in the auto sector was 217,000 dirhams; in food processing, the figure was 211,000 dirhams.[13]
The hyperspecialization of Morocco’s production profile also translates into a strong dependence on externally sourced inputs, particularly those with high technological content. Renault, for instance, imports all engines from the EU. While Stellantis does assemble some engines in Kenitra, it restricts its operations to diesel versions and uses components that almost entirely originate from abroad.[14] Generally speaking, moreover, the automotive sector’s domestic content use is fairly low. This is attested in a recent Bank Al-Maghrib report, which documented automotive parts being the second largest category of imports in 2024.[15] “Utility vehicles” is what occupies the second rank, which highlights another problem alongside dependence on foreign inputs: that is the sector’s almost complete concentration in assembling passenger cars for export to the EU.
Figure 1. Morocco’s automotive exports by product category. Data in million dirhams (1 dirham = 0.1 euro). Annotations on bars indicate the percentage of total automotive exports. Source: Lodi 2026; data from Agence Marocaine pour le Développement de l’Investissement et des Exportations (AMDIE).
Such a state of affairs is rooted in the predominance of foreign capital in Morocco’s automotive industry and in the structure of the global automotive sector, which is dominated not only by the major carmakers but also by large transnational groups in the supply chain.[16] The carmakers and supply chain kings both retain interests in relocating production to low-cost countries and in keeping higher–value-added activities within the triad (EU, USA, Japan) in order to preserve their monopolistic positions. Such interests have only deepened in a global context marked by major technological transformations, crises, and the fragmentation of the world market—and by growing competition among old and new centers of accumulation, such as China.[17]
The hierarchical organization of the automotive sector’s global value chains leaves relatively few opportunities for firms from emerging and developing countries. Lacking the know-how, economies of scale, and market access that only global firms possess, companies in the Global South face structural constraints in laying claim to value yielded by production. This is easily observed in Morocco. The decline in the relative capitalization of locally-owned automotive firms—from 17% to 6% of the automotive sector’s total between 2013 and 2023—speaks rather clearly to the difficulties of moving up in the industry. At this stage, Morocco’s auto industry is almost exclusively owned by non-national capitals: French companies Renault and Stellantis dominate in vehicle production while Japanese, U.S., and, to a lesser extent, German groups control the electrical components segment.[18]
The ownership structure of Morocco’s auto industry does not only limit prospects for technological convergence, value capture, and domestic wealth creation: in conjunction with the sector’s disconnection from the rest of the local economy, it also prevents automotive manufacturing from becoming a genuine engine of growth. This is evident from data on the share of manufacturing in GDP and employment, which have remained virtually stagnant at around 11 percent of GDP over the past decade and a half[19], despite the growing importance of investments by carmakers and component manufacturers. Moreover, automotive FDIs are geographically hyper-concentrated, with just two cities—Tangier and Kenitra—accounting for 90 percent of all investments and jobs created.[20]
It should also be noted that the processes which gave rise to Morocco’s (limited) automotive successes—trade liberalization and increasing integration into the EU market—had countervailing effects for Moroccan industry as a whole. Indeed, the combination of current account liberalization and EU integration actually provoked full-blown crises across most of the country’s productive sectors. This was particularly true for the textiles and clothing sectors. Their workforce shrank by one-third after the expiration of the Multi-Fibre Agreement in 2004, which had guaranteed preferential access for Maghreb garments to the EU.[21] And in general, Morocco’s reduction of tariff barriers led to a significant decline in domestic manufacturing value added—a decline only marginally offset by the automotive sector’s expansion, for reasons already detailed.
Critically, trade liberalization—together with lower tariffs on imported wheat, land privatizations, and policy conditionalities placed on product entry to the EU market, such as the removal of subsidies for local producers—also accelerated the crisis of small-scale agriculture and, consequently, a rural exodus to urban areas.[22] And here, the throughlines between the country’s neoliberal turn, the limits of its automotive sector, and the Generation Z protests can begin to come into view.
The Throughlines of Industrial Frailties and Protest
Unable to propel a broader industrial boom, the take-off of Morocco’s auto sector failed to create both the magnitude and type of labor demand needed to healthily absorb the out-migration from the country’s rural areas. It also failed to create the jobs needed to provide a landing spot for the growing number of young people entering the labor market each year. As such, the ranks of those employed in the informal sector expanded despite the rise of automobile manufacturing. At this point, informal employment accounts for roughly 70% of total employment. Nor should contemporaneous expansions to informality and automobile manufacturing be treated as independent phenomena. The competitiveness of automobile manufacturing and the attractiveness of investing in the sector, after all, have hinged on the unevenness of development in Morocco: It is the combination of impoverishment and dispossession in rural areas and the auto sector’s limited spillover effects which underpin the low-wage model that foreign capitals are exploiting.
This causal relation is visible in the composition and compensation of the auto sector’s labor force. The bulk of workers toiling in Moroccan auto manufacturing hail from the country’s agricultural regions. These rural migrants are expressly targeted by the recruitment strategies of TNCS: “Caravans” are regularly sent by the big multinationals to hire from the country’s depressed areas.[23] Having few other options, the workers brought in through these schemes tend to accept low pay. The most common wage in automotive companies is, in fact, the minimum wage—290 euros per month for 48 hours of work. Note that the national living wage is at least 600 euros. In vehicle assembly, conditions are somewhat better than average, with higher wages and a lower incidence of temporary contracts. However, Renault and Stellantis, the dominant actors in vehicle assembly, together employ no more than 10–12% of the total sectoral workforce. 60–70% of workers are employed in the manufacturing of wire harnesses, where exploitation is most severe and the workforce is predominantly precarious and feminized. Virtually the entirety of Morocco’s auto industry is based the country’s Free Zones, moreover, where firings, blacklisting of activists, and occasional police interventions against strikes undermine labor organization.[24]
Could the recent boost in Chinese and electric vehicle–related investments drive a structural transformation of this scenario? It is too soon to properly answer the question. A number of factors deserve our attention, however. First, foreign investments in electric batteries are relatively capital intensive. Furthermore, as is currently the case for car assembly, investments in this industrial line does not guarantee the establishment of an integrated domestic supply chain. On balance, the evidence therefore suggests that battery production will not move Morocco from its general specialization in the most labor-intensive and low–value-added automotive activities.
Second, the EU is presently motivated to improve its capacity in both EV and EB manufacturing. To these ends, Brussels is devoting significant resources. The EU’s 3-billion-euro Electric Battery Alliance program and establishment of relaxed rules for member states willing to subsidize investments in the sector give some indication of the investment.[25] For Morocco, Brussels’ interventions may work at cross-purposes to gaining a foothold in the electrification of the auto sector. While the availability of phosphate and cobalt makes Morocco an advantageous location for some raw materials processing activities, the subsidies in place within Europe will make it hard to challenge Western and Central-Eastern European countries when it comes to higher-tech cell assembly gigafactories.
Third, Morocco does not presently have the capacity to manufacture full electric vehicles, and it is still uncertain that it will acquire this capacity any time soon. Given that 80% of automobiles assembled in Tangier and Kenitra are exported to Europe, where CO₂ emission restrictions will gradually bring an end to traditional car sales by 2035, the electrification of the auto industry could present an existential danger to Morocco. Inasmuch as the EU also appears committed to protecting its own higher–value-added production and countering China’s growing influence in Morocco’s automotive sector—as demonstrated by the recent 40 percent tariffs imposed on wheel rim exports from the North African country—geopolitical and geoeconomic fractures may threaten Morocco, too.[26]
Seen in full, rather than expedite a process of “emergence,” Morocco’s integration into the global automotive sector has reproduced, in new forms, the country’s peripheral and dependent position within global capitalism. This reality is manifest in persistent disequilibria in Morocco’s balance of payments (BoP), disequilibria which offer a crucial lever for pressuring governors into adopting policies privileging the interests of transnational and international capital.
As the data shows, the rise of Morocco as an automotive hub has not meaningfully ameliorated the trade deficits being run up each year. To the contrary, trade deficits have actually grown since the auto sector’s take-off, averaging 9% per annum since the mid-2000s as compares to ~7% per annum in the 1990s and early 2000s.[27] Auto’s negligible impacts on Morocco’s aggregate international exchange can largely be attributed to foreign investments in the sector failing to generate significant growth and industrialization spillovers. In term of consequence, this inability to move the trade ledger forces policymakers to do whatever must be done to insure continuous inflows of external investments and credit.
From the Global Automotive to the FIFA 2030 World Cup: Megaprojects as a – Contradictory – Accommodation to GVC Subordination and Dependency
Over the last two decades, a key policy through which Morocco has secured these inflows is the so-called grands projets (megaprojects) strategy. Since the second half of the 2000s—and particularly after the 2008 crisis—the state has allocated dozens of billions of euros to infrastructure, energy, and real estate development programs. It has done so both to boost aggregate demand in a context of structurally negative net exports and wage repression and to attract foreign financial flows—directly or indirectly. The magnitude of this policy is evident from Morocco’s figures on gross capital formation, which have averaged nearly 30 percent of GDP over the past fifteen years.[28] The bulk of this investment does not come from the private sector but from state-owned entities and enterprises (SOEs), predominantly focusing on carrying out or coordinating construction works.
Importantly, without state-led expenditures in infrastructure such as the Tangier Med port complex, the surge and continuous inflow of automotive FDI would have been unthinkable. It also would not have materialized absent the mobilization of public capital in the form of fiscal incentives and investment subsidies: Renault and Stellantis’ expansions within the free zones of Tangier and Kenitra are very much underwritten by the public purse, and should be counted on the list of state-financed megaprojects. In addition, investments such as the Casablanca–Tangier high-speed rail line and the “urban redevelopment” schemes in major Moroccan cities, such as the Bouregreg Valley project in Rabat[29], have crucially contributed to Morocco’s relaunching as an attractive destination for wealthy foreigners, supporting FDI in real estate in addition to tourism revenues.
Together with the state itself, Morocco’s grand projects have involved major domestic banks, insurance groups, and construction firms. On the latter, note that many of these entities are controlled by the King’s own holding company and a narrow circle of big businessmen who rose to prominence during the mid-2000s privatizations, a social fraction within which Prime Minister Akhannouch is a leading member.[30]
The strengthening of this small elite through crony relations and public contracts should not, however, be viewed through prism of corruption, at least not exclusively. This is because it is rooted in a logic that Bonizzi et al. have defined as “subordinated financialization,” and is therefore inextricable from Morocco’s peripheral and dependent position in the global economy. Indeed, the ascent of these domestic capitals have actually opened abundant opportunities for foreign investors to profit seek in Morocco: The nurturing of so-called “national champions”[31] through megaproject-related procurements has supercharged the Casablanca Stock Exchange—the second largest African equities market in capitalization after Johannesburg—and in so doing, created plenty of space for speculation. Grand projets surrounding the 2030 FIFA World Cup have further charged this dynamic. Since January 2025, the stock market index for Casablanca’s exchange has leaped 30%, with many investors hoping that World Cup developments will uplift the country’s derivatives market in the coming period.[32]
As important as private capital flows have been to Morocco’s grand projet strategy, they actually pale in importance to those brought in from international financial institutions (the World Bank above all), EU countries, and Gulf states. Billions in loans from these multilateral and bilateral creditors have been the basis for all the biggest infrastructure investments, from the already mentioned Tangier Med to the giant Solar Plant Noor in Ouarzazate.[33] Incidentally, the latter contributed more to water distress in this southeastern semi-desert region than to reducing the country’s dependence on energy imports.[34] And while these loans have had positive effects on the BoP, at least in the short-term, over time they have contributed to the debt-dependent nature of Morocco’s entire growth model. Between 2016 and 2024, the liabilities of SOEs involved in the grands projets have soared from 150 billion dirhams to 336 billion (Figure 2). This is equal to roughly 30% of public debt—whose share of GDP peaked at 70% after the COVID crisis—and more than half of its external component, since roughly 60% of SOEs’ financing continues to come from foreign sources.[35]
Figure 2. Debt of Moroccan SOEs. Data in billion dirhams (1 dirham = 0.1 euro). Sources: Author’s elaboration based on Ministère de l’Économie et des Finances (available editions of Rapport sur la Dette Publique and Rapport sur les Établissements et les Entreprises Publiques, 2013–2025).
Importantly, even when SoE liabilities are not directly accounted for in the treasury budget, they are generally still backed by the state. This means when the country’s SoEs seek to refinance obligations, creditors do not only look at their books but the books of the state. Hence the pressure policymakers face toward adopting austerity: It is part and parcel of the state’s serving as guarantor for the grand projets. Also compelling policymakers to adopt austerity were more contingent developments set into motion during the COVID pandemic. When the U.S. and EU central banks raised interest rates to respond to inflation spirals, they helped drive foreign capital from Morocco. In conjunction with falling exports and tourism receipts during the lockdown period, this ultimately forced the Moroccan government to subscribe to a 3-billion SDR lending program with the IMF in 2020, an arrangement followed up by top-up credit lines of 5 and 4.5 billion SDR in 2023 and 2025, respectively.[36] As is customary, conditionalities attached to the loan included fiscal consolidation.
In comparative terms, Morocco has weathered austerity pressure relatively well. Over the past few years, the state budget for education and healthcare—whose shortcomings triggered the Gen Z protests—was not directly cut. The former indeed shifted from an average of 5% of GDP in the 2010s to 6% after 2020. Nevertheless, these allocations did nothing to change the fact that 30% of education expenditures remain in charge of families, nearly double the average burden recorded in OECD countries.[37] Furthermore, the burden may soon get worse. As Moroccan unions have denounced while striking in support of Gen Z protests last October, reform 59.24 is likely to drive up household expenditures on education by growing the market share of private institutions within tertiary education.[38] As for healthcare, state funding has stagnated at around 7% of total government expenditures over the last two decades.[39] This sum is not only lower than the 12% recommended by the World Health Organization, but also less than what the government disburses (8% total expenditures in 2024) to pay interest on its debts.[40]
Conclusions
There is no doubt that the 2030 World Cup will help revamp Morocco’s grands projets strategy. At least 6 billion euros in public money is presently allocated for investments in stadiums and other infrastructures, most notably airports and high-speed railways unaffordable for most Moroccans. This capital has largely been debt financed, predominantly through a 2025 Eurobond issuance but also through the borrowing of SoEs.[41] Mobilized at a time when Morocco has promised the IMF it will cut the public deficit from the current 4.5% to approximately 3% by 2030, these investments are poised to further squeeze the public welfare system.
Just as consequently, the continuation of the grands projets strategy seems unlikely to resolve the structural problems affecting the Moroccan economy—not least those entailing the strong asymmetry between the few regions relatively well integrated into the global economy and the majority of depressed rural areas destined to remain reservoirs of cheap labor for Western- and China-headquartered TNCs. As figures from the Ministry of Finance report, over the 2015–2025 period, the three regions of Casablanca, Rabat-Kenitra, and Tanger-Tetouan have benefited from 60% of total SOE investments.[42] The capital initiated to support World Cup-related projects follows this same geographic distribution.[43]
The causes of the Gen Z protests can be conceived narrowly. In the most immediate sense, these were mobilizations precipitated by declines in social services quality and anger at the public moneys being prioritized for the World Cup. But the protests can also be traced back to the larger model of dependent and subordinate capitalist development being pursued in Morocco. The protests can also show how notional successes—like the automobile industry’s take-off, large infrastructure projects, and being awarded the World Cup—connect to the marginalization of the many. As such, like other mass movements led by young people across the Global South, Morocco’s Gen Z protests demand reflection on the country’s political economy itself. When peripherality so harshly limits the gains that can be had through integration within global systems of production, exchange, and finance, a more radical way may in fact be the only viable path forward.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Photo Credit: Kingdom of Morocco Ministry of Industry and Trade
[1] Gereffi, G. 2019. “Economic Upgrading in Global Value Chains.” In Handbook on Global Value Chains, edited by Ponte S. at al., 240-254. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
[2] Sandberg, E., and S. Binder. 2020. Mohammed VI’s Strategies for Moroccan Economic Development. New York: Routledge.
[3] Amin, S. Imperialism and Unequal Development: Marxist Theory and Contemporary Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977.
[4] Smith, J. 2016. Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Bonizzi, B.; Kaltenbrunner, A. and J. Powell. 2019. “Subordinate financialization in emerging capitalist economies,” Greenwich Papers in Political Economy, Greenwhich: University of Greenwich. Greenwich Political Economy Research Centre. https://ideas.repec.org/p/gpe/wpaper/23044.html.
[5] HCP (Haut Commissariat au Plan.) 2024. ‘Les Comptes Nationaux Provisoires 2023, Base 2014 (Rapport Complet)”. https://www.hcp.ma/Les-comptes-nationaux-provisoires-2023-Base-2014-Rapportcomplet_a3891.html.
[6] Data Furnished by Organisation Internationle des Constructeurs Automobiles
[7] MIC (Ministère de l’Industrie et du Commerce) n. d. “Baromètre de l’industrie nationale : l’industrie marocaine franchit un nouveau cap en 2024.” https://www.mcinet.gov.ma/fr/actualites/barometre-de-lindustrie-nationale-lindustrie-marocaine-franchit-un-nouveau-cap-en-2024.
[8] See: HCP 2024
[9] Lodi, L. 2025. “A New ‘Emergent’ Powerhouse in the Global Automotive? Uneven Development, Exploitation, and Dependency in Morocco’s Car Industry.” Middle East Critique.
[10] Sbiti, S. 2024. “Comment et de quoi se constitute le futuer ecosystème des battéries electriques au Maroc?”. Le Desk. https://ledesk.ma/datadesk/comment-et-de-quoi-se-constitue-le-futur-ecosysteme-des-gigafactories-au-maroc/.
Ben Yahmed, M. 2025. “À Jorf Lasfar, le Maroc entre dans la course mondiale aux batteries électriques”. Jeune Afrique. https://www.jeuneafrique.com/1701036/economie-entreprises/maroc-chine-a-jorf-lasfar-cngr-et-al-mada-posent-la-premiere-pierre-dune-filiere-batterie-africaine/.
[11] “Le Chinois Citic Dicastal construit sa 3ᵉ usine au Maroc, pour un investissement de 1,8 MMDH.” 2024. Le Desk. https://ledesk.ma/2022/02/16/le-chinois-citic-dicastal-construit-sa-3eme-usine-au-maroc-pour-un-investissement-de-18-mmdh/.
[12] Hooper, O. 2025. “Chinese Tire Company to Invest Nearly $300 Million in Moroccan Factory.” Morocco World News. https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2023/01/37572/chinese-tire-company-to-invest-nearly-300-million-in-moroccan-factory/.
[13] See: HCP (2024)
[14] Lodi (2025)
[15] Bank Al‑Maghrib. 2025. Rapport annuel 2024. Rabat: Bank Al-Maghrib. https://www.bkam.ma/Publications-et-recherche/Publications-institutionnelles/Rapport-annuel-presente-a-sm-le-roi/Rapport-annuel-2024.
[16] Wong, W. K. 2018. Automotive Global Value Chain: The Rise of Mega Suppliers. London: Routledge.
[17] Krzywdzinski, M.; Lechowski, G.; Humphrey, J. and T. Pardi, eds. 2025. Global Shifts in the Automotive Sector: Markets, Firms and Technologies in the Age of Geopolitical Disruption. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
[18] Lodi (2025)
[19] HCP (2024)
[20] MIC (Ministère de l’Industrie et du Commerce). 2024. “Baromètre de l’industrie marocaine”. https://marocpme.gov.ma/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Barometre-delindustrie-.pdf.
[21] HCP (Haut Commissariat au Plan). 2014. “La hausse des exportations du textile a-t-elle soutenu l’emploi de la branche en 2014?” https://www.hcp.ma/file/231296/.
[22] Akesbi, N. 2023. Maroc : une économie sous plafond de verre : des origines à la crise Covid-19. Rabat: Revue marocaine des sciences politiques et sociales.
[23] Bidet, A; Ouédraogo, J-B.; Rot, G.; and Vatin, F. 2017. “Une nouvelle économie politique de l’industrie : l’essor du salariat mondialisé dans la zone franche de Tanger.” Revue marocaine des sciences politiques et sociales 14: 221-240.
[24] Lodi (2025).
[25] European Battery Alliance (EBA 250). 2023. “Strongly Welcomes New EU Financial Stimulus of e3bn to Boost Growth of the Battery Industry. European Battery Alliance.” https://www. eba250.com/european-battery-alliance-eba-250-strongly-welcomes-new-eu-financial-stimulusof-e3bn-to-boost-growth-of-the-battery-industry/.
[26] Mousjid, B. 2025b “Du cobalt au lithium, la Chine prend racine au Maroc… et Paris s’en méfie.” Jeune Afrique, 6 Oct. 2025.
[27] World Bank n.d. (a.). “External balance of Good and Services – Morocco”. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.RSB.GNFS.ZS?locations=MA.
[28] World Bank. n. d. (b.) “Gross capital formation (% of GDP) – Morocco” 2025. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.GDI.TOTL.ZS?locations=MA.
[29] Bogaert, K. 2019. Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
[30] Aksebi (2023);
[31] Mhaoud, S. 2018. Les champions nationaux : l’équation du développement au Maroc. Casablanca: En Toutes Lettres.
[32] Aublanc, A. 2025 “Maroc : la Bourse de Casablanca bat des records, au risque de l’explosion d’une possible bulle spéculative.” Le Monde. https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2025/07/25/maroc-la-bourse-de-casablanca-bat-des-records-au-risque-de-l-explosion-d-une-possible-bulle-speculative_6623887_3212.html.
[33] See: Sandberg and Binder (2020).
[34] Moustakbal, J. 2022. “Le secteur énergétique marocain toujours dépendant du privé.” Orient XXI. https://orientxxi.info/magazine/le-secteur-energetique-marocain-toujours-dependant-du-prive,5268.
[35] Ministère de l’Économie et des Finances (MEF). Rapport sur la situation économique et financière du Maroc 2023. Rabat: MEF, 2024. https://www.chambredesrepresentants.ma/sites/default/files/2024-10/08-%20Rapport%20Dette%20publique_Fr.pdf.
[36] IMF (International Monetary Fund.) 2025. Morocco: 2025 Article IV Consultation and Third Review Under the Arrangement Under the Resilience and Sustainability Facility – Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Morocco, Staff Country Report No. 2025/087. Washington D.C.: International Monetary Fund.
[37] Ibriz, S. 2020. “Les Marocains assurent 30 % du coût de l’éducation, le double de la moyenne OCDE.” Médias24. https://medias24.com/2020/12/07/les-marocains-assurent-30-du-cout-de-leducation-le-double-de-la-moyenne-ocd/.
[38] Staff Writer, “Maroc : l’enseignement supérieur en grève rejoint les revendications des jeunes de la GenZ 212,”. 2025. RFI Afrique, 8 octobre 2025.
[39] World Bank. n. d. (c.) “Domestic general government health expenditure (% of general government expenditure) – Morocco.” https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.GE.ZS?locations=MA.
[40] IMF (2025).
[41] Mousjid (2025)
[42] Azeroual, M. 2025. “Investissement public au Maroc : moteur sous pression.” Librentreprise. https://librentreprise.ma/2025/05/28/investissement-public-au-maroc-moteur-sous-pression/.
[43] Mousjid (2025).
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In October 2025, tens of thousands took to the streets in the Tunisian coastal city of Gabes after the country’s General Labour Union (UGTT) called for a general strike to protest what locals have called an “environmental assassination”. The crisis was triggered by the pollution produced by the city’s giant phosphate complex. Once celebrated as a symbol of Tunisia’s industrial modernity, the complex is today condemned for polluting the region’s air, plants and water, and for driving a sharp increase of cancer and respiratory diseases rates. In the weeks preceding the protest, more than 200 people in Gabes were hospitalized for respiratory conditions due to the plant’s emissions of phosphogypsum and gas residues. “Even Gabes’s pomegranates now taste like smoke”, said a local resident describing the situation in the city.[1]
These types of localized environmental and health harms proliferate not only across North Africa but the whole of the global south. Take for example the cement industry in Egypt. Residents of Wadi al-Qamar neighborhood in Alexandria have for years been exposed to the toxic emissions produced by the Titan Cement factory located meters from their homes. This led many residents to suffer from chronic respiratory illnesses. After years of filing complaints to official environmental authorities yielded no results, victims had no choice but to seek redress in the courts. Hearings on their case began nearly a decade ago. Just recently, they did win compensation for the health damages caused by the plant’s pollution. Alas, the victory was more exception than rule, testifying to the severity of the environmental harm rather than to the judicial system’s general willingness to protect the victims of industrial excess. And despite the court ruling (which Titan Cement initially appealed), the company continued to drag its feet in making the payments owed.[2]
All this proceeds against a backdrop begging questions as to the actual objectives of the global north’s greening agenda. Recent investments made by multilateral lenders in North Africa point to a significant misalignment between the north’s goals and the south’s needs. This is exemplified by a recent IFC-issued credit line for solar-powered phosphate projects in Morocco[3] and the EBRD’s backing of hydrogen-based cement upgrades in Egypt.[4] Focused solely on carbon metrics, both financial arrangements seek only to replace fossil energy with renewables during the respective production processes. As such, the loans do not address the other ecological harms associated with phosphate and cement production–e.g. water pollution and depletion, air pollution, ecosystem damage. They also do nothing to alter the fundamental character of the relation binding the economies of Europe to those of North Africa. Today as in the past, this is a relation premised on extraction and unequal exchange. Europe’s near-shoring of much of its heavy industry to the southern shores of the Mediterranean testifies as much. Done with an eye on supply chain security and cleaning up the homeland, near-shoring is leading to a substantive transfer of ecological damage to countries like Egypt, who, desperate as ever for hard currency, have stepped in as key partners in this European initiative. The surge of high polluting, energy-intensive exports presently departing Egyptian ports for Europe, in fact, has been large enough to even gain notice at Reuters. As the news agency reported a few months back, “the higher (industrial) output in Egypt has emerged just as production of the same commodities has decreased in Europe, and highlights a growing trend in the re-shoring of smokestack sectors away from high energy-cost locations and areas with pollution controls”.
If markets, classes and nations are bound in dialectical unity, what governs this unity in the era of the green transition? Surveying evidence gathered in the Environmentally Extended Multi-Regional Input–Output (EEMRIO) database, we will propose that the green transition is being governed by forms of exchange more environmentally destructive to the global south than those practiced in colonial times: In the colonial period, after all, extremely polluting industries–such as coal mining, steel and textiles–were still concentrated in the global north.
We put forth this proposition in view of differentials both in the ecological intensity of exports and currency valuations. Adopting a per-monetary-unit approach rather than a total volume of resource transfer approach–the latter being favored by most scholars working on ecologically unequal exchange[5]–our research offers a precise determination of the ecological losses embedded in each unit of commercial exchange. It also clarifies the extent to which discrepancies in currency values mediate the spread of ecological loss.
Unequal Exchange in the Modern Day: Monetary Dynamics and the Distribution of Ecological Pain
One of the organizing principles of global capitalism and as such, of the green transition, is unequal exchange. Playing an essential role here is the hierarchy of national currencies. By dint of this hierarchy’s discriminatory logic, countries in the global south, inclusive of North Africa, are today absorbing, and systematically so, disproportionate ecological burdens in engaging in international trade.
For the likes of Egypt and Tunisia in particular, monetary dynamics have weighed on proceedings as follows. Under the pressure of financial markets and the guidance of international financial institutions (IFIs), policymakers and capitals have persistently sought external competitiveness through a familiar two-step: undervaluing local currencies and leveraging comparative advantages in the production of low-price and resource-intensive commodities. Abiding by the terms of classical trade theory promoting specialization and an International Division of Labour (IDL), this is a strategy meant to resolve structural trade deficits. In reality, however, it has begotten resource depletion and ecological degradation while doing little to alleviate recurring strains on the current account. Effects on resource depletion and ecological degradation derive in part from currency devaluation: Devaluation makes it more attractive for foreign and local capitals to develop polluting and resource-intensive production in devalued economies. To understand why, consider that with the currency weakened, the relative costs of investment and labor compensation is cheapened just as the competitiveness of outputs on international markets for commodities and simple manufactures is heightened.
However, the weakening of the currency also has the effect of raising the price of imports. Moreover, with time, the terms of trade (TOT) and real (i.e. accounting for inflation) and sometimes nominal exchange value of the commodities being produced tends to decline. This is due to a handful of structural properties baked into the international trade system–specifically, oversupply, extreme competitiveness for lower value-added goods and services, and differences in the price and income elasticity of demand for non-essential capital-intensive versus essential resource-intensive goods and services. Hence, the strategy being adopted tends not to ease trade deficits just as it requires that more land, water, and energy be extracted to maintain the same levels of hard currency revenues.
Nor is this the only way that currency dynamics facilitate unequal exchange. Also factoring is the spatial relativity of currency value. This can be observed through mapping the geographic unevenness of a currency’s Purchasing Power Parity (PPP). Specifically, it is almost always the case that the purchasing power of currency issued by a high income country (HIC) will be far greater when spent within a lower middle income country (LMIC) rather than at home. Substantively, this value disparity constitutes a subsidy for HIC firms operating abroad–and presents obvious opportunities for arbitrage. For LMICs, contrarily, the disparity creates a ‘distortion factor’ which serves to systemically suppress domestic wages and commodity prices, as Josef Köhler has documented.[6]
And also pushing in that same direction of wage and commodity price repression, of course, is the very structure of global value chains (GVCs). With few exceptions, GVCs evince monopolies and monopsonistic properties on the buyer side. A handful of firms from the global north hoard intellectual property and with it, a claim to the lion’s share of value generated in the production process. Through branding and marketing power, these same firms also control access to final consumers. The latter especially weighs on the producers of primary goods such as Egypt and Tunisia. Its effects are visible in the staggering differentials separating the price that an exporter receives for its product and the one consumers pay for that product at the retail level in the importing country. For a sense of scale, the example of Egyptian oranges may be instructive: In some instances, the price received by the Egyptian exporter of an orange has been reported as being as low as 10% of the retail price in the importing country.[7] Materially, this means that the capital accumulated through the sale of an orange is almost entirely captured in the importing country, split between a coterie of importers, transporters, retailers and governments (via value-added taxes in the latter case). It also means the Egyptian exporter must increase the volume of his/her sales and with it, the ecological footprint of production, in order to grasp at profitability.
Undervaluing the environment
Beyond the orange example, the empirics demonstrate quite clearly how unequal exchange more generally taxes the ecologies of North Africa. In the first instance, one sees that a sizable portion of the region’s total exports are made up of commodities characterised by high ecological intensity and low value such as crops, cement, phosphates, and textiles. With an export basket biased in this manner, commercial exchange engenders enormous ecological losses. Evaluated in terms of water-dollar terms, North Africa’s average monetary return on freshwater use is about $10 per cubic meter. This figure is consistent with the average yields observed in middle income countries. Contrarily, high income countries (HIC) earn on average $57 for every cubic meter of water withdrawn.[8] And cavernous though this gap is, it does not tell the full story: Egypt’s agricultural exports have a return of about $0.5 for every cubic metre of water used, less than 1% of the average monetary return on water in HICs .[9]
THE ECOLOGICAL RAVAGES OF TRADE
As mentioned, North Africa’s main export sectors include fertilizers, cement, textiles, and vegetable oils. Each produces environmental burdens per unit of export value dozens of times higher than the export industries of HICs. This is evinced quite starkly in Table 1. As it displays, every €1 million of phosphate fertilizer exported from North Africa generates 40 times more freshwater toxicity compared to average HIC exports. Textile exports from North Africa produce 15 times more freshwater pollution per €1 million than the HIC average, while the yield for cement exports is ten times greater. The acidification and eutrophication caused by North Africa’s cement exports, moreover, is about 500 times higher than average HIC exports. Critically, even industries perceived as ‘low-impact’, such as vegetable oils, emit nearly 20 times more freshwater toxins and far greater terrestrial pollutants than their high-income counterparts.
| Non-emission environmental impacts of select North African exports (2021) | ||||
| Industry | Freshwater Ecotoxicity (CTUe) by EUR mil | Terrestrial Ecotoxicity (kg 1,4-DCB eq.) by EUR mil | Ecosystem Damage (PAF m³·day) by EUR mil | Acidification/Eutrophication (PAF m³·day) |
| Phosphate Fertilizer | 9420.556172 | 340.264321943 | 8652.06155836 | 15919.637462 |
| Cement | 2358.10345499 | 122.578921681 | 1802.51628605 | 372334.191945 |
| Vegetable Oils | 4198.012448 | 89.4324282171 | 1109.13905538 | 4058.43148439 |
| Textiles | 3584.702279 | 138.411084561 | 1576.88363697 | 21483.7624318 |
| Average HIC | 229.5021281 | 15.56492202 | 92.86115602 | 742.6295464 |
| Source: EXIOBASE 3 EEMRIO data. Average HIC based on author calculation. Methodology for calculating average HIC import impact can be found here: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6997348/v2 | ||||
Homing in on the Monetary Domain
Per our thesis, the empirics also affirm that these differentials in the pollution generated through trade are highly impacted by differentials in currency values. This is most easily tracked across Egypt’s contemporary history.
With the International Monetary Fund serving as the handmaiden of devaluation, between 2016 and 2024, the Egyptian pound fell from an exchange value of EGP 7 to EGP 50 per USD. As would have been anticipated by Fund economists, the currency’s weakening did boost export volumes for agricultural goods, which became relatively cheaper for importers largely based in Europe and the Gulf.[10] However, growth in volume came at enormous cost: With the per unit hard currency revenues being generated through agricultural exports falling lower due to the EGP’s descent, export volumes needed to be significantly scaled to derive the same pre-devaluation dollar yield.
To see the moving parts, let’s return to oranges. First consider that the average export price per ton of Egyptian oranges for the years preceding the 2016 devaluation (2008–2016) was $513 per ton, compared to $473 per ton for the post-devaluation period (2017–2023).[11] And things got much worse thereafter: In 2024, the price per ton reached $150, despite the dollar itself shedding exchange value last year. Moreover, with the dollar’s own purchasing power declining markedly for more than a decade–a dollar today only fetches about 70% of what it did in 2012–the real return generated by orange exports is even less than these distressing numbers suggest. If the likes of Egyptian oranges managed to capture an unprecedented share of the European market last year, then, it was only because the export price had collapsed to an unsustainable $0.15 per kilogram.[12]
Ecologically, the consequence of intensifying extraction to cancel out the effects of currency loss were substantial. After all, citrus cultivation is among the most water-intensive agricultural activities, and Egypt is already a profoundly water-stressed country. In growing more oranges just to sell them for a pittance, Egypt ended up earning 100 times less on every 1000 litres of water embedded in its agricultural exports (about $0.5[13]) than high-income countries earn on an average export. Leaving aside costs in terms of energy, labour, associated environmental degradation, the trade can only be conceived as a dreadful loser.
Nor is the case of Egypt exceptional within North Africa. This monetary-ecological dynamic is well at work in Tunisia, too. The depreciation of Tunisia’s dinar which commenced in the mid-2010s has not only been followed by worsening trade deficits[14]: it has coincided with the increased exports and declining hard currency yields (on a per unit basis) for resource intensive commodities such as olive oil.[15] The last fifteen months have been especially bad in this regard, with the prices fetched by olive oil producers tanking by huge margins. As this has come during a time of long term drought in the Maghreb region and Southern Europe, Tunisia’s redoubling of olive cultivation has required the deployment of waters sourced from scarce groundwater.[16] The long-term ecological effects of this are certain to be pronounced.
Zooming out, it bears mentioning that agricultural commodity prices have been on a downslope since 2011[17], a period when many LMICs experienced currency devaluations as part of IMF structural adjustment programmes.[18]
Towards a just ecological revaluation
With global carbon emissions barrelling past tipping points, ecological sustainability coming into question in many parts of North Africa, and balance of payment strains rendering austerity a fixture of the policy regime in Egypt and Tunisia, it is critical that the system of exchange driving these outcomes finally be addressed. In the global south, this will minimally require that policymakers abandon policies of competitive devaluation and instead promote strategies that reflect the true ecological cost of production. The latter will entail identifying where points of leverage exist in the trade system and coordinating with regional peers to most durably exploit them.
Concerning points of leverage, the low Price Elasticity of Demand (PED) for key North African exports offers policymakers a real opportunity.[19] With Europe especially having few immediate alternatives for certain crops and minerals, a coordinated strategy supply management arrangement might allow for reductions to export volumes without incurring meaningful drops in export revenues. This is because planned cuts to supply should generate positive price effects for the goods in question. The duration of the effect could vary by good: It is possible that a meaningful jump in the price of phosphates would make extraction from the huge deposits discovered in Norway commercially viable and in so doing, potentially risk North Africa’s access to the European market. Nevertheless, this in and of itself would not be the worst outcome: a drop in demand offset by a spike in prices would provide ecological relief to countries like Egypt without eating into hard currency revenues. Indeed, the price outlook for a supply cut is strong, if slightly less for products like olive oil where there are close substitutes (butter, rapeseed oil) on the market. Were commodities producers in Sub-Saharan Africa, southern Europe, West Asia and North Africa integrated into the coordination framework, the potency of restricting supply would be even more enhanced. Ultimately, in managing the supply of primary goods, North Africa could not only reduce the social and ecological footprint of its existing export basket: it could, through wise investment of the revenues gained, open a window to capture more of of global value chains (i.e. investing in processing, branding, transportation infrastructure, etc.).
This would hardly be the first time that such an intervention in the marketplace was attempted. Managing commodity supply through coordinated export or production controls has, in fact, long been a lever through which states and firms influence global prices. Early in the twentieth century, private corporate alliances such as the U.S.-based Copper Export Association,[20] and several international aluminium cartels, sought to regulate output and sustain prices for their respective commodities.[21] In the wake of the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration institutionalized this approach through the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which mandated production cuts across major crops to stabilize collapsing agricultural prices.[22] Post-war decades, meanwhile, saw the proliferation of international commodity agreements covering commodities such as tea, rubber, sugar, coffee, and copper, which attempted to influence supply through export restrictions and production quotas.[23] And we have abundant examples from the present day, too. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) management of oil supplies is perhaps the most obvious. But we can also consider Indonesia’s 2020 ban on nickel exports, which led to a sharp rise in global nickel prices and strengthened the country’s bargaining position in the fast-growing battery supply chain.[24] Likewise, India’s temporary suspension of non-basmati rice exports in 2022–2023 led to a spike in world rice prices. The latter two cases show the power that even a single large producer can exert on global commodity markets. A commodity alliance containing within it multiple major exporters of the same commodity should certainly be able to do the same.[25] In coupling price gains with ecological premia, such an alliance could be the start of a more sustainable and resilient tomorrow for North Africa.
Downstream from the brass tacks of trade, policymakers across the global south should also demand that ecological costs be integrated into international trade accounting. This means moving beyond conventional trade statistics to report the environmental load per export dollar, making exports’ ecological costs transparent and quantifiable. This would provide a tool for conducting more effective Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) for export and investment decisions that go beyond narrow carbon metrics.
Conclusion
In putting differentials in the per unit ecological cost of exchange front and center, the link between systemic currency undervaluation and the accelerating degradation of North Africa\’s natural and ecological capital becomes unmissable. As our research shows, North African exports embed dozens of times more resources, labour and localised ecological harm than their HIC counterparts. This stark imbalance is not an outcome of inefficiency but the designed result of a global price regime that systematically undervalues the region\’s commodities, labour, and natural resources.
The repeated implementation of currency devaluation policies, exemplified by the collapse of export prices for water-intensive commodities such as Egyptian oranges and Tunisian olive oil, is currently compelling the region to deplete its finite and precious resources at fire-sale prices merely to satisfy debt obligations and achieve marginal trade balance improvements. A pivot must be made for the region to have the future it deserves. As we contended in the previous section, such a pivot should entail an end to competitiveness-minded currency devaluations–and the embrace of a coordinated strategy for ecological revaluation. Philosophically speaking, it might also entail redefining our notions of success and prosperity. As is becoming increasingly clear, the welfare of nations is not measured in its volume of exports but in its capacity to regenerate the resource base rather than deplete it, thereby providing a healthy environment, social security and leisure to its citizens. Fighting for a global pricing system that accurately reflects the ecological and labour cost of production is essential for North Africa to make welfare gains of the second kind. It may also be the region’s last chance to avoid turning into a ‘sacrifice zone’–a place forsaken to sustain what are ultimately unsustainable global consumption patterns.
This publication has been supported by the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. The positions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung.
Photo Credit: Jbdodane “Port for Phosphate Export from the Bou Craa Mine”, Flickr (2013)
[1] Al Jazeera. “General Strike Shuts down Tunisia’s Gabes over Pollution Crisis.” Al Jazeera, October 21, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/21/general-strike-shuts-down-tunisias-gabes-over-pollution-crisis.
[2] Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), “بعد معركة قضائية دامت 10 سنوات: تيتان تبدأ تعويض ضحايا انتهاكاتها البيئية” [After a 10-Year Legal Battle, Titan Begins Compensating Victims of Its Environmental Violations], March 12, 2025, https://eipr.org/press/2025/03/بعد–معركة–قضائية–دامت-10-سنوات–تيتان–تبدأ–تعويض–ضحايا–انتهاكاتها–البيئية.
[3] International Financial Corporation (IFC). “IFC and OCP Group Partner to Build Solar Plants, Green Fertilizer Production in Morocco.” IFC, 2023. https://www.ifc.org/en/pressroom/2023/ifc-and-ocp-group-partner-to-build-solar-plants-green-fertilizer-production-in-morocco.
[4] European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). “EBRD and EU Foster Energy Efficiency in Egypt’s Cement Industry.” European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), 2025. https://www.ebrd.com/home/news-and-events/news/2025/ebrd-and-eu-foster-energy-efficiency-in-egypt-s-cement-industry.html.
[5] Ecologically Unequal Exchange (EUE) refers to a field of study in political ecology and world-systems theory that examines how high-income countries systematically appropriate more biophysical resources such as land, energy, and materials through an International Division of Labour and trade, effectively outsourcing environmental costs of production to lower-income countries. It argues that structural inequalities in global trade allow wealthier nations to sustain consumption and growth by externalizing ecological degradation and labor intensity to the Global South. Key contributions include Bunker (1985), Hornborg (1998), and more recent empirical work by Dorninger et al. (2021) and Hickel et al. (2022), which quantify the total material and energy flows embodied in traded commodities.
[6] Gernot Köhler, “Estimating Unequal Exchange: Sub-Saharan Africa to the World.” Accounting for Colonialism, 2023, 297–315. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32804-6_14.
[7] East Fruit. “Prices for Oranges in Egypt Have Fallen to 15 Cents per Kg – How to Find New Markets Urgently?! .” East Fruit, April 22, 2024. https://east-fruit.com/en/news/prices-for-oranges-in-egypt-have-fallen-to-15-cents-per-kg-how-to-find-new-markets-urgently/.
[8] Our World in Data. “Water Productivity, GDP per Cubic Meter of Freshwater Withdrawal.” Our World in Data, 2025.https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/water-productivity?mapSelect=MAR~TUN~EGY~LBY~DZA~OWID_HIC~OWID_UMC~OWID_LMC
[9] Osama Diab, “التكلفة المرتفعة للأسعار المنخفضة: صادرات الزراعة المصرية,” Almanassa, November 2025, https://almanassa.com/stories/27968.
[10] Daily News Egypt. “Egypt’s Agricultural Exports Surpass 7.2 Million Tonnes in 2025.” Dailynewsegypt, September 22, 2025. https://www.dailynewsegypt.com/2025/09/22/egypts-agricultural-exports-surpass-7-2-million-tonnes-in-2025/.
[11] Omnya Ahmed Saad El-Azazy and Samy Ghenmy. “An Economic Study of the Competitiveness of Egyptian Oranges in the Markets of the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries.” Alexandria Journal of Agricultural Sciences 70, no. 4 (2025): 390–434. https://doi.org/10.21608/alexja.2025.390715.1143.
[12] East Fruit. “Prices for Oranges in Egypt Have Fallen to 15 Cents per Kg – How to Find New Markets Urgently?! .” East Fruit, April 22, 2024. https://east-fruit.com/en/news/prices-for-oranges-in-egypt-have-fallen-to-15-cents-per-kg-how-to-find-new-markets-urgently/.
[13] Osama Diab, “التكلفة المرتفعة للأسعار المنخفضة: صادرات الزراعة المصرية,” Almanassa, November 2025, https://almanassa.com/stories/27968.
[14] Ben Sik Ali, Ameni. “Understanding the Devaluation of the Dinar.” https://www.economie-tunisie.org/, 2023. https://www.economie-tunisie.org/sites/default/files/fiche_reforme_devaluation_eng.pdf.
[15] See: International Olive Council, “Olive oil statistics June/July 2025”, Report (Madrid, Spain).
Milling Middle East & Africa Magazine . “Tunisia’s Olive Oil Export Volumes Increase as Revenues Decline amid Global Price Crash .” Milling Middle East & Africa Magazine , August 26, 2025. https://millingmea.com/tunisias-olive-oil-export-volumes-increase-as-revenues-decline-amid-global-price-crash/.
[16] Knaepen, Hanne. “Climate Risks in Tunisia.” Cascades, February 2021. https://www.cascades.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Climate-risks-in-Tunisia-Challenges-to-adaptation-in-the-agri-food-system-1.pdf.
[17] IndexMundi. “Commodity Agricultural Raw Materials Index Monthly Price – Index Number.” IndexMundi, 2025. https://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=agricultural-raw-materials-price-index&months=.
[18] IMF Monitor. “Conditionality.” IMF Monitor. Accessed October 21, 2025. https://www.imfmonitor.org/conditionality.
[19] See: Christian Bogmans, Andrea Pescatori, Ivan Petrella, Ervin Prifti, and Martin Stuermer, “The power of prices: how fast do commodity markets adjust to shocks”, Working Paper 24/77: International Monetary Fund (2024).
Thibault Fally and James Sayre, “Commodity trade matters”, Working Paper 24965: NBER Working Paper Series (2018).
[20] Rausser, Gordon & Stuermer. “A Dynamic Analysis of Collusive Action: The Case of the World Copper Market, 1882-2016.” MPRA Paper, February 2, 2020. https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/104708.html.
[21] Bertilorenzi, Marco. “Business, Finance, and Politics: The Rise and Fall of International Aluminium Cartels, 1914–45.” Business History 56, no. 2 (April 3, 2013): 236–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2013.771337.
[22] Bowers, Douglas, Wayne D. Rasmussen, and Gladys L. Baker. History of Agricultural Price-Support and Adjustment Programs, 1933–84. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1984. https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=41994
[23] Radetzki, Marian. “Price Formation and Price Trends in Exhaustible Resource Markets.” In Trade, Competition, and the Pricing of Commodities, edited by Frédéric Jenny and Simon Evenett. London: CEPR Press, 2012. https://cepr.org/publications/books-and-reports/trade-competition-and-pricing-commodities.
[24] Palaon, Hilman, and Robert Walker. “A Glimpse into Indonesia’s Nickel Policy.” Lowy Institute, August 23, 2024. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/glimpse-indonesia-s-nickel-policy.
[25] Nes, Kjersti, K. Aleks Schaefer, and Jisang Yu. “Economic Impacts of the Indian Ban on Non-Basmati Rice Exports.” Food Policy 134 (July 2025). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodpol.2025.102893.
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This field-based ethnographic account explores how the Covid-19 pandemic was experienced, interpreted, and negotiated in the rural and refugee-hosting areas of Eastern Cameroon. Drawing on observations, informal conversations, and interviews, the study examines the local reception and reinterpretation of public health measures, the lived realities of confinement, and the reconfigurations of international aid.
Rather than treating the pandemic as a universal event, the analysis foregrounds its fragmented presence and uneven intensity, shaped by longstanding precarities, institutional mistrust, and situated logics of survival. Covid-19 is approached here as a social and political dispositive: an ensemble of norms, absences, and constraints whose local effects depended less on adherence than on adaptation, navigation, and reappropriation. By attending to everyday tactics, this article contributes to an anthropology of pandemics that centres lived experience, local meaning-making, and the micropolitics of crisis management from below.
On 17 March 2020, just eleven days after the first case of Covid-19 was detected in the country, the Cameroonian government announced a series of measures aimed at curbing the spread of the pandemic: closure of borders, schools, and entertainment venues (bars, nightclubs, etc.); a ban on public gatherings; restrictions on movement; and, from 13 April onwards, the mandatory wearing of face masks in public spaces.
Since then, several studies would document the political, economic, and social logics shaping Cameroon’s response to Covid-19. Through these prisms, researchers investigated public policy choices1, controversies and scandals surrounding the management of the crisis2, socio-economic effects3, low vaccination rates4, and widespread popular scepticism about the disease.
This piece offers a glimpse, both visual and verbal, into how the pandemic was experienced through the lens of everyday life in rural areas of Eastern Cameroon. Arriving in February 2020 for a second fieldwork period as part of my doctoral research, I found myself – unexpectedly – documenting, month by month, how the pandemic was received, bypassed, and interpreted by local Cameroonian populations, by refugees from neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), and by international NGO and UN agency staff tasked with implementing international assistance operations in the Kette district (Kadey division). The aim was to observe their day-to-day realities and listen to what they had to say5.
Figure 1. Locations and Fieldwork Sites Referenced in the Article
These field notes draw on ethnographic observations, informal conversations, and excerpts from interviews conducted with local and refugee populations, religious and traditional leaders, and staff from international aid organisations. What follows is a series of fragmentary scenes: challenged beliefs, reinterpreted health norms, constrained mobility, discreet tactics, forms of aid that were at once ubiquitous and disappointing. This account highlights a series of dissonances: between international directives and local constraints, between aid mechanisms and survival logics, between intervention categories and strategies of adaptation. The pandemic is thus repositioned within local hierarchies, where hunger, malaria, closed schools, or empty market stalls may, at times, take precedence over the virus itself. The objective here is to offer an account, from the margins, of what the health crisis produced, displaced, imposed, or made visible.
Note on the Use of Illustrations
To illustrate this article, I chose to use stylised images rather than direct photographs from the field, for two main reasons. First, some of these photographs, due to their aesthetic and composition, closely resemble those used in the communication campaigns of international aid organisations. Second, the choice reflects an ethical concern: in connection with issues of anonymisation and ongoing debates around the notion of “informed consent”6, the use of photographs raises questions regarding the protection of the anonymity of individuals featured in such images.
The sketches presented here were therefore created from field photographs that were subsequently processed into graphic form (filtered and treated using AI tools7). In doing so, they allow for visual representation of certain observations while safeguarding the integrity of the people involved and avoiding any potentially harmful institutional connotations.
“Let someone tell me whether this disease is real”: Doubt, Distrust, and the Negotiation of the Pandemic’s Meaning
The Virus as Suspicion
Although very few cases of Covid-19 were recorded in Eastern Cameroon, the virus circulated widely in discourse, rumour, and religious preaching – yet rarely featured in first-hand accounts. There were no “confirmed” deaths, few identifiable cases of illness, and health directives issued from above were often poorly understood, translated, or received.
In this context, what prevailed was not fear of the virus, but doubt: about its existence, its severity, and the intentions of those speaking about it. As a traditional leader from the region explained:
First, there is doubt – a big doubt – about the existence of this pandemic, or even of the coronavirus itself. […] People are sceptical; they’re not sure: does this virus really exist? For them, it’s a fabrication, a creation serving the economic interests of certain lobbies – perhaps even the government – to make money.8
This scepticism was rooted in a strong historical continuity: from the traumatic memory of colonial medicine9 to the mistrust generated by past health campaigns against diseases like smallpox or malaria, often marked by coercive or poorly understood protocols10. In everyday life, this doubt was also fuelled by several factors: the absence of visible cases, mistrust of official discourse, and the disconnect between alarming health messages and perceived reality. Without deaths or spectacular symptoms, the virus remained elusive, difficult to grasp as a tangible threat. The first deaths attributed to Covid-19 sparked scepticism, even anger, as expressed with irritation by a farmer from the Kette area:
That man had been diabetic for years. And now they’re saying it was Corona that killed him? It’s all just stories!11
This anger was further inflamed by reports of corrupt practices linked to certain pandemic prevention measures. It was said that hospitals, citing health regulations intended to prevent contagion, refused to return the bodies of deceased individuals unless the family “offers something”. Except for deaths whose cause was indisputable (such as road accidents), “coronavirus” was systematically listed as the cause of death on certificates. The rising number of Covid-attributed deaths was thus seen not as evidence of the virus’s lethality, but as a reflection of the new opportunities for financial extraction that it enabled.
Whether or not these claims were factually accurate mattered less here than the fact that they circulated. They revealed a tense relationship with the health system, where any prescription may be suspected of hiding a transaction or concealed interest. In a context of weak healthcare provision and widespread mistrust of authorities, rumours took on a structuring role. They expressed a longstanding distrust of the state and its agents, shifting the pandemic from the realm of medicine to that of social and political interpretation12.
Power, Faith, and the Politics of Doubt
From the outset, the pandemic was perceived as a matter of power: sanitary, political, and economic. This perception not only fuelled scepticism about the existence of Covid-19 but also fed a broader sense of anger that would, at times, erupt publicly. In March 2021, during the funeral of a local dignitary in Kette, these tensions came sharply into focus. When a former MP stood up to attribute the death to Covid-19, he provoked immediate outrage from the family and attendees, and had to leave in haste to avoid being assaulted. His words triggered such a wave of doubt and suspicion that the crowd demanded the coffin be opened to confirm that the chief’s body was indeed inside. The unrest escalated to such a degree that the sub-prefect was forced to call for intervention by the Bataillon d’Intervention Rapide (BIR), a special forces’ unit stationed in the region to combat incursions by Central African rebel groups. These elite forces secured the area and, with the support of staff from the district hospital, resealed the coffin, conducted the burial, and covered the grave with a concrete slab to prevent it from being reopened.
In this climate of uncertainty, various authorities found themselves in competition. On 18 March 2020, the Cameroonian government announced a series of measures: school closures, mandatory mask-wearing, movement restrictions, and physical distancing. But across the country, both the enforcement of these measures and, more significantly, how they were perceived, varied widely. Sub-prefects, security forces, managers of refugee camps, and INGO staff were all involved in implementing the response, each according to their own interpretation, resources, and priorities.
In this context, religious leaders played a decisive role. Respected and listened to – “because they are our guides and they look after our safety”, explained a Central African refugee – imams and priests used the space of religious sermons to recall examples of pandemics in sacred texts and to stress the importance, for instance, of “not leaving a plague-stricken area, nor entering one”. It was they who made several government measures more acceptable, especially those poorly received at the local level. For example, the closure of places of worship and the ban on public gatherings did not mean that religious practice had to stop altogether: sermons recalled that the Qur’an permits prayer at home, or even the suspension of mosque attendance when it is too cold, when a storm is approaching, or when “there is too much mud or difficulty”. Yet even among these respected figures, doubt persisted. As the imam of the main mosque in Boubara explained:
I comply with preventive measures. I also carry out awareness-raising. But I wonder whether this Covid disease they talk about actually exists?
In such a context, medical discourse – once it drifted too far from lived experience – was felt not only as distant, but at times as intrusive or even aggressive. Doubt, in response, did not signal apathy or indifference but rather a form of resistance: refusing to believe in the virus became a way to reject a discourse imposed from outside – one that dictated what to do, what to stop doing, and what to fear. It was a matter of lived experience, of hierarchies of authority, and of day-to-day survival. Doubt was not a pathology of belief: it was a strategy of adaptation. Faced with an external medical narrative often poorly aligned with local realities (as further illustrated below), doubt served to preserve room for manoeuvre. For many, the virus was a secondary concern, less troubling than hunger, the cost of transport, or experiences of stigmatisation. This was not denial, but rather a local reinterpretation of a global phenomenon. Doubt, in this context, was active; it formed part of the survival toolkit especially in settings marked by severe socio-economic precarity, as the next section illustrates.
“We Suffered”: Economic and Social Reorganisation in Response to the Pandemic
Covid-19 was a disease because it created hardship in terms of food rations and access to the water borehole.
Central African female refugee, farmer
This Covid-19 brought misery: famine, suspicion between people, financial hardship, the end of schooling, and more.
Cameroonian pre-school female teacher
Lockdown as an Impossible Luxury
In official discourse relayed from Yaoundé or through the local branches of INGOs, the injunction to “stay at home” was widely disseminated: avoid contact, close markets, limit non-essential travel. But these guidelines quickly came up against the realities of daily life in villages where most houses are not designed to be occupied all day, or in cramped and overcrowded refugee shelters. Added to this are the precarious livelihoods of a large part of the population. As one Central African male farmer, a long-term refugee in Cameroon, put it:
We can’t stay at home if there’s nothing to eat. We have no choice: we have to go out to find something to feed the family.
A Mbororo dignitary echoed this, explaining:
In our current socio-economic situation, it’s very difficult to impose a lockdown. Most people live day to day: if you don’t work today, you don’t eat. Or you won’t have anything to eat tomorrow. […] People survive one day at a time; they earn their daily bread after working. Not everyone has a salary, not everyone can plan their monthly expenses. That’s just not possible. It’s about daily earnings: if you don’t work today, you won’t eat. That’s the reality. So when they say ‘lockdown, no one goes out’ – no, that can’t work. It’s impossible.
For much of the population, public health guidelines were not perceived as protective measures, but rather as expectations impossible to meet within the constraints of everyday survival. In the rural areas of Eastern Cameroon, lockdown was not a public health option: it was a luxury, reserved for those with the means to stock up. Whether in villages or refugee settlements, salaried employment is rare. The local economy is largely based on daily income from farming, artisanal gold mining, or small-scale trading. Yet petty trade faced major logistical challenges due to restrictions on movement, the official closure of the border with the Central African Republic, and rising transport costs – which, for example, increased from 2,500 to 4,000 XAF (roughly €3.80 to €6) for the trip from Kette to Batouri – in a country where the minimum wage is around 36,000 XAF (about €55).
Holding Daily Life Together, Despite Everything
Aware of these realities, the authorities opted for a “partial lockdown”13: borders were closed, as were educational and training institutions; gatherings and movement were restricted, and a curfew was imposed. In the rural regions of Eastern Cameroon, people were still allowed to leave their homes – for example, to work in the fields or in small-scale artisanal gold mining sites – but evening gatherings, which usually punctuate the end of the day, were limited. Alongside the (official) closure of bars and other social venues, roadside activities were banned: female fish vendors, male and female cafeteria operators offering tea or spaghetti with eggs, informal traders: all were asked to shut down earlier than usual, typically between 6 and 10 p.m., depending on the area. As one male butcher explained, people tried to adapt, to “get by by selling during the day”, and to shop earlier – at least when possible and when the money was available.
Many households had to wait for family members to return from work to see whether that day’s earnings would cover basic needs – whether they could afford cooking oil or a specific ingredient. In families working in the gold sites, members only returned in the late afternoon and would still need to wash the ore and sell it before they could afford to go shopping. Early shop closures thus forced some households into debt, or to sell the few animals they raised – chickens, goats, sheep. In response to rising prices, others turned to what is locally called “bush provisioning” (ravitaillement champêtre), heading into the forest to forage for food, even if it meant changing their diet. One male farmer recounted feeding his family through fishing, while a male Central African herder, who had taken refuge in Cameroon in 2014, explained:
I stopped my job to take care of my family […]. I gathered all my children at home, and we went to the fields to look for vegetables.
Another hard-hit sector was made up of those whose income depended on schools. From March 2020 until the end of the academic year, the government ordered the closure of all educational and vocational training institutions14. This led to the sudden collapse of livelihoods for many: motorbike taxi drivers who provided school transport morning and evening; women selling beignets haricots (sweet fritters served with savoury red beans) or other meals in contexts where school canteens are rare; and neighbourhood shopkeepers who no longer saw children coming in to buy exercise books, pens, chalk, or “loaded bread” (pain chargé), the buttered or chocolate-filled half-baguettes eaten on the way to or at school.
Weekly markets continued to operate, but as prices soared and more and more products became unavailable, the authorities instructed people to comply with preventive measures (mesures barrières) and, in particular, to wear face masks. Yet, as one male primary school headteacher explained, masks “make you suffocate and burn your ears”, so they were mostly worn around the neck or under the chin, simply to avoid trouble during checks. Many people didn’t wear them at all: some cited the cost (500 XAF), others dismissed the requirement as mere “hassle”. When sub-prefects occasionally visited the markets to “monitor” compliance with the government’s health measures, they were met with scenes of hasty dispersal among those without masks. In a Cameroonian context marked by entrenched authoritarian routines15, it is not advisable to be seen openly defying state directives.
Public Health Measures: (Mis)Alignment, Evasion, and Reappropriation
Handwashing, Preventive Measures, and Local Habits
Even if many people expressed doubts about the seriousness or even the existence of the pandemic, this did not necessarily mean a wholesale rejection of all protective measures. The acceptability of these measures was largely proportional to how well they aligned with the realities and contexts in which they were applied. Thus, while lockdown was widely seen as creating more problems than it solved (as discussed earlier), other measures were more readily accepted, as explained by the same Mbororo community leader in Kadey:
Despite all the doubts about the existence of the disease, people were still careful and washed their hands regularly, because it doesn’t require much effort. Even before the pandemic, they’d been hearing this message for a long time, and they know that if you don’t wash your hands, you can catch diseases. They’ll tell you themselves: ‘Washing hands is no problem; we’ve always done it.’ […] Whether in Kette, in my neighbourhood, or here in Batouri, I heard it often: ‘Wash the children’s hands, you heard there’s that illness going around.’
Regular handwashing was easier to adopt because it reinforced habits already present before the pandemic. In Fulani households, people use boutas (small water jugs) and soap for the ritual ablutions performed before Islamic prayer. Among the Gbaya, families already shared a bucket or cup to rinse their hands before eating a communal meal. However, this apparently simple gesture reveals deeper disparities in access to resources, gendered roles, and logistical constraints. Regular handwashing depends on an entire chain of material and social dependencies. It requires increased consumption of water and soap, goods that are not always readily available. While some distributions were carried out by local authorities or INGOs, these were far from sufficient to meet the needs implied by public health recommendations. In some neighbourhoods, “handwashing stations” were installed – typically a bucket with a tap at standing height, along with a bar of soap (see Figure 2). But because no provisions were made for maintenance or resupply, many stations were empty within days. Some were vandalised, others simply neglected. In many villages, the link between public health messaging and the logistics of daily life was conspicuously absent from institutional discourse.
Figure 2. Example of a handwashing station in Eastern Cameroon (July 2020)
Regular handwashing also required increased water use, meaning more frequent trips to water sources or boreholes. This task typically fell to women and girls, sometimes with the help of children. People queued with their containers, and in the crowds that formed around water points, it became nearly impossible to respect physical distancing. These gatherings could also give rise to tension between users: “Women fight to get water,” explained a female resident of Boubara, noting that with so few water points compared to the number of users, “people push and jostle”. To reduce crowding, pandemic guidelines stipulated that only one member per household should go to collect water. But one person carries less than several would, so either multiple trips were needed – or the restriction was ignored.
INGOs sent staff to carry out awareness campaigns at water points. But as one male outreach worker admitted:
We tried, but it’s hard. Wearing a mask all the time, queuing up, waiting your turn… it’s hard. We did everything we could in terms of raising awareness and promoting preventive measures. But to be honest, if I were in their shoes, I don\’t think I could do it either! I say what I’m supposed to say, but deep down, I know I couldn’t even do it myself! (laughs)
In some neighbourhoods, a small-scale mobile water distribution system emerged, with vendors selling water door-to-door using handcarts – locally called pousses – loaded with six to ten 20-litre jerrycans, each sold for 100 XAF. But accessing this service required additional spending, making it available only to those with sufficient means.
Accessing Healthcare: Too Expensive, Too Risky?
Not all recommended protective measures met the same level of acceptance. Mask-wearing in particular came up against a range of obstacles: cost, discomfort, and unintended consequences, especially regarding access to healthcare. With the pandemic, wearing a face mask (referred to locally as cache-nez) became mandatory to enter health facilities. Yet, despite some distribution efforts by INGOs or certain local authorities, many people simply did not have one. Acquiring a mask represented a non-negligible expense for households whose incomes were already severely strained. At 500 XAF per mask, equipping both the sick person and their caregiver with a mask became a significant burden. For some families, this was enough to deter them from seeking medical care for their child, as this male community leader from Kadey explains:
When a household is overwhelmed just trying to find food, healthcare comes second. […] You see, people struggle even to get treatment for malaria. The child has a fever, they’re just lying there, but the mother can’t take them to the hospital because there’s no money. So she gives them bark to drink, things like that… And only when the child starts convulsing do they take them to a traditional healer. Sometimes the child pulls through… Sometimes, they don’t.
Other individuals avoided going to health centres for fear of infection. A male Central African herder, now a refugee in Cameroon, explained:
Now I’m the one who accompanies anyone who’s ill to the hospital, because my wife is too afraid of the disease.
As hospitals came to be seen not as places of care but as potential sites of contamination, many families turned instead to traditional healers. Remedies included concoctions made from neem leaves, or infusions of ginger and lemon. Seeking these treatments did not necessarily signal resistance to so-called modern medicine16. In fact, many people moved back and forth between the two systems: first trying local remedies, then going to the hospital if symptoms persisted. But during the pandemic, this usual complementarity was often interrupted – due to a lack of money, fear of contamination, or, as explained above, fear of being quarantined.
Facing the Reconfiguration of International Aid
INGOs Go Remote – and Refugees Step In
When the pandemic struck, INGOs supporting refugee populations in the area adapted both their activities and their modes of intervention. With schools closed, gatherings banned, and movement restricted, it was no longer possible to run education follow-up programmes, remedial classes, or various “awareness-raising” or “community mobilisation” workshops. At the same time, most organisations placed their staff under lockdown. As a result, the usual traffic of white 4x4s bearing the logos of UNHCR, UNICEF, IMC or ADES across the region dropped significantly.
Only staff in charge of so-called “essential” activities continued to move around the area; the rest worked remotely, often with unstable access to electricity or internet. Since they could no longer travel to the field, project implementation was delegated to intermediaries: “community relays” who were supplied with masks, hand sanitiser, mobile phone credit, loudspeakers, posters, and other visual materials, in order to promote preventative measures and other health measures within their villages or neighbourhoods. Some even used portable speakers strapped to the back of motorbikes to conduct so-called “Covid-19 awareness caravans” (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Covid-19 awareness caravan in the Kette district (July 2020)
This visibility helped to sustain the image of an active, responsive, and engaged international aid sector. But in the villages, two prevailing sentiments emerged. First, many felt that the aid on offer did not match their concrete needs. While some people welcomed the dissemination of information about the virus, the quantities of masks and soap distributed were widely seen as insufficient. More importantly, after several weeks, fatigue and frustration set in, driven by the impression that the Covid-19 response had eclipsed all other priorities, including essential needs. Due to supply chain disruptions and staff lockdowns, the World Food Programme (WFP) suspended its usual food distributions in the area for several months. When I spoke with women in the border village of Gbiti in August 2020, it was the first thing they mentioned. They expressed confusion over why food distributions had stopped precisely when supplies in local markets were dwindling and prices were rising sharply. A few months later, in November, during a coordination meeting between international aid actors, a UNHCR representative acknowledged:
We bought a lot of medical equipment – respirators and so on – which went unused. But a recent survey of refugees on the impact of Covid-19 found that 93% can no longer support themselves, and 73% can no longer afford to eat.
Second, by carrying out tasks usually reserved for INGO staff, so-called “beneficiaries” demonstrated their capacity to implement these assistance programmes directly. As one male employee of an INGO explained:
In the months following the pandemic, the refugees said they knew how to do the registrations, and everything else INGOs usually do. So they didn’t see the point of having humanitarian actors come and show them what to do. In every area, they even said the actors were misleading them. So the refugees said: ‘No, we don’t need someone to come tell us what to do.’
This phenomenon of direct subcontracting by some international aid organisations offered refugee populations an opportunity to reclaim agency over projects targeting them. What was initially justified by the health emergency increasingly became part of a broader logic of cost-efficiency and partial withdrawal of aid. As I observed over the year following the onset of the pandemic, many of these dynamics outlasted the official lifting of Covid-related restrictions. Faced with ongoing budget cuts, international NGOs and UN agencies continued to reduce their staffing and delegate various tasks – registration of new arrivals, day-to-day coordination, management of water points, food distributions – to the target populations themselves, sometimes organised into “committees” or referred to as “local relays” and “community mobilisers”.
Confined for Others: Inverted Vulnerability
In formal refugee camps, the measure with the greatest impact on displaced persons – though not in sanitary terms17 – was the strict lockdown to which they were subjected: UNHCR announced that refugees were no longer allowed to leave the camp premises. This approach sharply contrasted with the national policy adopted at the time, which favoured partial confinement. The justification given was twofold: to protect displaced populations from infection, and to prevent them from potentially infecting host communities. In doing so, the pandemic inverted the usual framing of vulnerability which, in Cameroon as in many other humanitarian contexts, is central to international aid operations18. The “vulnerable” were no longer the refugees targeted by assistance programmes, but the surrounding host populations whom they might endanger.
In a context where most refugees rely on daily outings beyond the camps to secure livelihoods, this strict lockdown imposed by international institutions deprived people of their basic means at the very moment when, as seen above, border closures and movement restrictions had already led to shortages and price inflation. The worsening of living conditions caused by this “protective confinement” policy constitutes a form of structural violence, akin to that observed during Ebola epidemics: the “the way institutions and practices inflict avoidable harm by impairing basic human needs”19.
Moreover, while the Cameroonian government officially began easing pandemic-related restrictions on 30 April 2020, a stricter system of quarantine was simultaneously introduced in the camps, even though no Covid-19 cases had yet been detected there. Refugees already under lockdown were now subject to an additional layer of control with the construction of prefabricated buildings meant to serve as Covid-19 isolation centres (see Figure 4). These centres were designed with a one-way entrance, leading first to a “yellow zone”, where symptomatic individuals were tested. If they tested positive, they were transferred to a “red zone”, where they remained for two weeks in isolation, receiving medical and food assistance from aid organisations. After this period, they were moved to a “green zone” for post-recovery observation before being allowed to leave.
Figure 4. Isolation centre built by UNHCR to host individuals who tested positive for Covid-19 (May 2020)
Despite their very limited use (in Timangolo, only seven people were ever isolated), these centres encountered strong opposition from the refugee population. Many individuals refused to go, fearing stigmatisation, or preferring to isolate at home. Others relied on accounts from those who had gone through the process and returned disillusioned, reporting inadequate food rations and the absence of any financial compensation to support their families while they were quarantined and unable to provide.
In reaction to this intensified confinement, some refugees chose to leave the camps altogether and settle in the bush, where they could both escape restrictions and survive off wild foraging and local resources. Others described waiting for nightfall – once UN and INGO staff had left – to “sneak out of the camp […] and cross the border into CAR”, or go to the gold-mining sites “to find something to support the family”. These practices illustrate the ways in which refugee populations adapted, resisted, and circumvented the immobilising mechanisms imposed upon them.
Conclusion
This field account did not seek to explain the Covid-19 pandemic, to measure its impact, or to assess the adequacy of the responses it generated. Rather, it aimed to follow how the crisis manifested in the everyday lives of rural and refugee populations in East Cameroon. By paying close attention to its detours, side effects, and local reappropriations, the aim was to observe how this global health crisis was integrated, subverted, challenged or ignored – not through denial, but out of necessity, survival logic, or a different way of making sense of things.
The pandemic did not unfold with the same intensity everywhere, nor did it operate through the same frameworks. In the sub-division of Kette, it sometimes existed less as a virus than as a device: a set of norms, gestures, closures, noise, expectations, and absences. It brought into being a reality shaped by new constraints, but also by revealing forces – exposing the precariousness of livelihoods, the fragility of aid structures, and the political uses of vulnerability.
Faced with often ill-adapted instructions and partially withdrawn support systems, local actors – whether Central African refugees, Cameroonian residents, or aid workers – improvised, adjusted, circumvented. Doubting the virus, wearing masks under the chin, going out at night, selling goods earlier in the day, praying at home, giving one’s child an herbal remedy: all these were strategies forged in the interstices of mistrust, weariness, conviction, and cunning.
By documenting these scenes, this text hopes to contribute to an ethnography of pandemics that is not centred on political decisions or health statistics alone, but on what such crises do to the ordinary. On how they settle into the folds of the everyday, confront local logics, and at times reinforce – or reconfigure – pre-existing inequalities.
Footnotes
1 Alexandre T. Djimeli, « La communication publique sur la Covid-19 au Cameroun : une lecture systémique des logiques d’action dans le temps de l’« angoisse pandémique » », Djiboul 1, no 7 (2024): 3‑18.
2 Larissa Kojoué et al., « Rendre compte de la fracture politique. Crise sanitaire, communication gouvernementale et légitimité politique au Cameroun », Global Africa, no 9 (2025): 130‑41; Mahama Tawat, « Fake News and COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy: A Study of Practices and Sociopolitical Implications in Cameroon », SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY, 21 mai 2021).
3 Raoul Ehode Elah, « Etat des lieux de l’impact socioéconomique de la Covid-19 au Cameroun », Revue de l’académie des sciences sociales du Cameroun, no 18 (2022): 501‑13.
4 Jerome Nyhalah Dinga et al., « Factors Driving COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Cameroon and Their Implications for Africa: A Comparison of Two Cross-Sectional Studies Conducted 19 Months Apart in 2020 and 2022 », Vaccines 10, no 9 (2022): 1401; Ramatu Abdu et Nixon Kahjum Takor, « COVID 19 Immunization (Vaccine) Reticence and Traditional Healthcare Resilience among the Mbororos of the North-West Region (Cameroon), 2020- 2022 », Humanities and Social Sciences, 2022, 8.
5 All expressions in quotation marks in the text are verbatim excerpts from informal conversations (author’s translation from French).
6 Daniel Cefaï, « Codifier l’engagement ethnographique ? Remarques sur le consentement éclairé, les codes d’éthique et les comités d’éthique », in L’Engagement ethnographique (Paris: EHESS, 2010), 493‑512; Isabelle Clair, « Faire du terrain en féministe », Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 213, no 3 (2016): 81.
7 Designed with the help of Fotor software: https://goart.fotor.com/
8 Interview, Batouri, 19/03/2021.
9 Guillaume Lachenal, Le médicament qui devait sauver l’Afrique (2014), Paris : La Découverte ; Sara Lowes & Eduardo Montero, “The Legacy of Colonial Medicine in Central Africa”, American Economic Review, vol. 111, n°4 (2021): 1284–1314.
10 Emmanuelle Roth, “Epidemic temporalities: A concise literature review”, Anthropology Today, vol. 36, n°4 (2020): 13-16; Dinga et al., “Factors Driving COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Cameroon”.
11 Informal discussion, Kette district, August 2020.
12 Kojoué et al., « Rendre compte de la fracture politique ».
13 Antoine de Padoue Nsegbe, Désiré Ndoki, et Aristide Yemmafouo, « Gouvernance de la Covid-19 et impacts socio-économiques et politiques des mesures prises dans le cadre de la lutte contre la pandémie au Cameroun », Les Cahiers d’Outre-Mer n° 282, no 2 (2020): 419‑35.
14 See Lefort-Rieu & Ngodji, « Aide internationale et gouvernances éducatives en situation de pandémie : la Covid-19 au Cameroun », Cahiers d’études africaines, n°250 (2023) : 243-262.
15 Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle, « Routines autoritaires et innovations militantes », Politique africaine, vol. 108, n°4 (2007) : 155-172.
16 Claire Lefort-Rieu et al., « La santé globale à l’épreuve du local en contexte pandémique : réceptions et (re)négociations des normes et modèles de lutte contre la pandémie de Covid-19 au Cameroun », Suds, no 288 (2023): 15‑46.
17 Between March and December 2020, UNHCR recorded nineteen positive cases of Covid-19 among the 280,000 ‘people of concern’ under its mandate in Eastern Cameroon (data presented during a UNHCR coordination meeting on the update of its ‘East Cameroon Covid-19 Contingency Plan’; field observation, 01/03/2021, Yaoundé).
18 Joël Glasman, « Vulnerability: impartial algorithms and analog malnutrition », in Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs: Minimal Humanity (Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2019), 211‑42.
19 Annie Wilkinson et Melissa Leach, « Briefing: Ebola–myths, realities, and structural violence », African Affairs 114, no 454 (1 janvier 2015): 136‑48.
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