BEN GUERIR — Under a blazing sun, the “Marion” is extracting several cubic meters of rock with a deafening crash. From the 64-meter height of its crane, the 700-ton steel monster drops the blocks at the top of a mound, raising a cloud of dust so large that it covers the sight of stones rolling down the enormous already-formed pile. The dragline excavator, as it is called in mining jargon, is named after the U.S. construction equipment manufacturer, which has been based in Ohio since 1884: Marion Power Shovel Company was taken over in 1997 by the mining equipment company Bucyrus, bought in 2010 by the famous Caterpillar brand.
Marion, which can move its enormous mass at 100 meters per hour thanks to two gigantic articulated legs, and extract up to 550m3 of material per hour, is one of the four mechanical excavators operating at the Ben Guerir phosphate mine. Since 1979, the state-owned OCP Group (formerly known as Office Chérifien des Phosphates) has been exploiting some 9,000 hectares there — first underground and then open-air — to extract phosphate, one of Morocco‘s most strategic resources.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
The country has nearly 70% of the known reserves of this mineral, which is essential in the production of fertilizer for agriculture.
A few kilometers away, in an almost desert landscape near the town of Ben Guerir, an hour by car from Marrakech to the south, and two hours from Casablanca to the north, the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) emerged from the ground in 2017. Its monumental buildings, looking like large ocher-colored cubes, house offices, amphitheaters, laboratories, hotels, restaurants and sports facilities, including outdoor swimming pools that are like oases of freshness in this mineral universe.
There, some 6,000 students from 30 nationalities (60% female and 40% male) are preparing to become the African elite of tomorrow, in fields ranging from research and teaching to entrepreneurship. An estimated 60% of these students receive full scholarships, 20% are semi-scholarship holders, while the remaining 20% pay the equivalent of 8,000 to 12,000 euros in annual tuition.
But what is the connection between this world of academic excellence and the harsh and rather crude mining sector? It’s a major player in the Moroccan economy: the OCP Group. The global company, chaired by Moroccan businessman Mostafa Terrab, is 95% owned by the Kingdom of Morocco and reached revenues of 114.5 billion dirhams in 2022 (around $31 billion).
It is also the developer of the UM6P.
The origin of the project goes back to the 2009-2012 period, explains Khalid Baddou, director of institutional affairs at the the university, and chief of staff of its president Hicham El Habti. “The OCP Group manages 60% of the world’s phosphate reserves,” Baddou explained. “And it wanted to refocus its strategy to reduce dependency on exports, and to process phosphate within Morocco, in order to bring more added value to the country.”
A 3.5-billion-euro corporate foundation
After envisioning at first a corporate university, where teaching and research would focus on the company’s activities, the OCP Group was asked by Morocco’s King Mohammed VI to develop a more global project.
That’s how the UM6P was founded, on the outskirts of Ben Guerir, where the company donated some 1,000 hectares of land to its corporate foundation to carry out this project. The non-profit foundation owns 100% of the university.
To date, it has been allocated 3.5 billion euros and has invested in ultra-modern premises and equipment on the Ben Guerir campus, but also in Rabat and Casablanca on the site of the OCP Group’s former headquarters.
Its ambitions are not limited to Morocco, where the UM6P has partnered with the country’s 12 public universities. Three years ago, the institution launched the Excellence in Africa initiative, a joint project with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. It includes three components: the digitalization of education in Africa, the “Hundred PHDs for Africa” project dedicated to identifying and training 100 doctoral students who will be able to stay in their native countries and contribute to their development, and finally, the “Junior Faculty” that aims at training future teachers in African universities.
One of the ingredients of the Silicon Valley’s success is the proximity between academics and industries.
Beyond the African continent, the UM6P has established partnerships with several prestigious institutions in the United States, Canada, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland and of course, France. Among them, the Ecole Normale Supérieure, the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, the Ecole Polytechnique, Mines ParisTech and HEC Paris. The Moroccan university even opened a branch in France last year, with headquarters in Paris.
Partner of the Californian Plug and Play fund
The university, which the Kingdom declared of “public interest,” aims to be the spearhead of an even greater ambition: making Ben Guerir the African Silicon Valley. “One of the ingredients of the Silicon Valley’s success in California is the proximity between academics and industries. It was built over the course of about thirty years. We are trying to shorten this time,” Khalid Baddou says.
To do this, the director of institutional affairs adds, “the UM6P is a partner of one of Silicon Valley’s investment funds, Plug and Play, which incubated Google in its early days and with whom we set up Plug and Play Africa. We rely on its network, its strike force, its expertise, and the fund, on the innovation ecosystem surrounding the university.”
Solar panels are deployed, with unique shapes that resemble a flower whose petals turn towards the sun.
The UM6P has set up an investment fund within the Californian Silicon Valley itself. “Bidra (*seed in Arabic) buys stakes in much more mature start-ups with the aim of being able to finance them on future technologies or to bring them into the university’s ecosystem,” Khalid Baddou explains.
Photovoltaic energy
The Ben Guerir site includes the African Supercomputing Center, the largest data center in Morocco, which was inaugurated in 2021, and its Toubkal supercomputer — the most powerful in Africa — which is operating with 30% of green energy and 100% recycled water.
The site also includes a six-hectare experimental farm, a Green Energy Park (GEP) and, very close by, a Green and Smart Building Park where new construction materials and energy-saving solutions are tested in about 30 small houses — all across 12 hectares.
The Green Energy Park is a good example of the ecosystems built around the UM6P. Solar panels are deployed on the site, some with unique shapes that resemble a flower whose petals turn towards the sun. The panels supply a thermodynamic solar power plant in the start-up phase. The electricity produced by the photovoltaic panels on-site already generates 1 megawatt, powering the university buildings.
Some of these panels are undergoing certification testing, in particular to meet the demands of the ONCF, the Moroccan National Railways Office, and France’s national state-owned railway company SNCF for the roofs of their stations, or even to supply the Renault automobile factory in Tangier.
The GEP also has a partnership with French multinational utility company Engie for panel cleaning solutions. While the Green Energy Park works mainly on solar energy, it also has a green hydrogen pilot unit in the middle of this forest of panels.
About 20 start-ups incubated
There is also activity in the field of charging stations, carried out by iSmart, a start-up created in the UM6P ecosystem. It has developed low-voltage terminals that can be installed at home (two equip the GEP car park) and has a production capacity of at least 2,000 stations per year for a purchase cost of around 800 euros.
iSmart is also working on prototypes of superchargers for service stations, which are made of 80% of parts manufactured in Morocco. The start-up attracted a lot of interest, notably from the Moroccan oil group Afriquia, but iSmart shareholders put an end to the discussions.
“We have supported more than 600 project leaders,” explains Khalid Baddou. “This led to the creation of about 20 start-ups that we incubated, accompanied and boosted with investment funds.”
Soil modeling to improve agronomic practices
Food sovereignty is another major challenge for the African continent. The UM6P School of Agriculture, Fertilization and Environmental Sciences was created nine months ago by gathering together 12 research entities in the field of agriculture and environmental sciences which used to work independently.
The aim is to “de-risk” agricultural production by taking into account the impact of climate change.
“In addition to research, we want to work in a more integrated way to develop solutions via numerous partnerships in Africa and internationally,” says the school’s dean, Belgian professor Bruno Gérard. “Innovation and entrepreneurship are our two pillars.”
The institution has a dual objective: to promote better agronomic practices and “de-risk” agricultural production by taking into account the impact of climate change.
At the Center of Excellence in Soil and Fertilizer Research in Africa (CESFRA), one of the school’s entities, laboratory manager Laila Tajeddine explains that a “Moroccan soil library has no less than 800 samples that allow modeling using mathematical algorithms and machine learning.”
This allowed the development of maps of the entire country in order to determine the most fertile regions. But also, to complete the picture with the OCP Group’s main activity, the establishment of a program to rehabilitate land exploited by phosphate mines.
In Ben Guerir, 3,000 hectares will ultimately be covered by this rehabilitation program. Olive and argan trees can now be seen growing where Marion, the dragline excavator, has finished its job.
