The Poorest Cities in Morocco, Ranked by Region and Cause

Table of Contents

The short version

Morocco doesn’t publish a city-level poverty ranking, and neither does anyone else — every official number comes out at the regional level. But the regions that consistently top the list are Draa-Tafilalet, Beni Mellal-Khenifra, and parts of Fes-Meknes, and within those regions a handful of specific cities carry the label in practice: Zagora, Errachidia, Khenifra, Taounate, Sidi Ifni, Sefrou, Beni Mellal, and Ouarzazate. None of them are destitute by the standards of the region’s worst rural pockets — they’re the urban hubs surrounded by the poverty, which is a different and more complicated story than “poorest city” implies.

Why “poorest city” is the wrong question in Morocco

Aerial view of a traditional Moroccan town in a desert landscape with mountains.

Here’s the thing nobody’s search result tells you: urban poverty in Morocco is almost a non-issue. Only about 2–3% of city dwellers fall under the national poverty line, according to HCP figures. Rural poverty runs anywhere from 11% to 24% depending on the province. So when you ask “which Moroccan cities are poorest,” what you’re really asking is “which cities anchor the poorest rural hinterlands” — because the city itself usually has electricity, a hospital, and a market, while the douars (villages) an hour outside it might not.

That distinction matters because it changes what “poor” looks like on the ground. A city like Zagora isn’t a slum. It’s a functioning provincial capital with a souk, a handful of riads, and cell service. What makes it show up on this list is that it’s the administrative seat for a province where drought has gutted the date-palm economy and youth unemployment pushes people toward Casablanca or Europe the moment they can afford a bus ticket.

Nationally, this problem is shrinking, not growing. Morocco’s monetary poverty rate fell from 4.8% in 2013 to 3.9% in 2022, and a broader multidimensional poverty measure — which factors in health, education, and living standards, not just income — has roughly halved over the past decade, according to HCP data reported by Morocco World News. The gap between regions is closing too, just slowly, and unevenly.

With that framing in place, here are the eight cities that keep surfacing as the country’s economically weakest urban centers, ordered roughly by severity.

1. Zagora

Region: Draa-Tafilalet. Population: around 42,000.

Zagora is the gateway town everyone photographs on the way to the Sahara — the “Timbuktu 52 days” road sign is right here — but the tourist traffic passing through doesn’t translate into local income the way you’d expect. The town sits at the end of the Draa River valley, and the valley’s oasis agriculture (dates, henna, some almonds) has taken repeated hits from drought years that have cut water flow to a trickle in sections of the riverbed. When the palm groves struggle, so does everyone whose income traces back to them, directly or through the informal labor market.

Draa-Tafilalet as a region posted one of the steepest declines in multidimensional poverty of any region in the country over the last decade — down 6.7 percentage points — which tells you two things at once: conditions have genuinely improved, and they started from a rough baseline.

2. Errachidia

Region: Draa-Tafilalet. Population: roughly 98,000 in the city, over 427,000 across the province.

Errachidia is bigger and more built-out than Zagora — it’s a provincial capital with a university branch and an airport — but the surrounding province is heavily rural and dependent on subsistence agriculture and small-scale phosphate and lead mining that has never scaled into a real employer. The Tafilalet oasis system nearby faces the same water-stress problems as the Draa valley: a shrinking aquifer and rainfall patterns that no longer support the date and cereal cycles that generations of families relied on.

Tranquil desert scene featuring sand dunes and palm trees under a clear sky.

Tourism helps at the margins — this is jump-off territory for Merzouga and the Erg Chebbi dunes — but most of that revenue concentrates around the dunes themselves, not in Errachidia’s city center.

3. Khenifra

Region: Beni Mellal-Khenifra. Population: around 124,000.

Khenifra sits in the Middle Atlas foothills, historically known as Zayane and Amazigh territory, and its economy still leans heavily on forestry, livestock, and small agriculture rather than anything industrial. Beni Mellal-Khenifra as a whole reported a 9.8% poverty rate in 2024 — the highest of any region in the country — even after a 7.5-point improvement over the previous decade. Khenifra city is the poorer, more rural-facing half of that region compared to Beni Mellal itself, which has more commercial infrastructure.

4. Taounate

Region: Fes-Meknes. Provincial population: around 613,000.

Taounate is about as rural as Moroccan provinces get — cereal farming, olive groves, and livestock dominate, and industrialization is nearly absent. It sits in the Rif foothills, an area that has historically received less state infrastructure investment than the plains or coastal regions, and the terrain itself (steep, hard to irrigate at scale) limits what farming can do for household income. Fes-Meknes posted a 9.0% poverty rate in 2024, the second-highest of any Moroccan region, and Taounate is one of the provinces dragging that average up.

5. Sidi Ifni

Region: Guelmim-Oued Noun. Provincial population: around 105,000.

Sidi Ifni is the odd entry on this list because it’s a genuinely beautiful Atlantic fishing town, all Spanish Art Deco facades left over from the colonial era, with surf breaks that draw a small but loyal crowd of travelers. The economy runs almost entirely on fishing, and when the port’s catch is thin or export prices dip, there isn’t a backup industry to absorb the slack. The town’s remoteness — several hours from the nearest major airport — also keeps outside investment and broader tourism revenue lower than the coastline itself would suggest it should be.

6. Sefrou

Region: Fes-Meknes.

Sefrou sits just south of Fes, in the shadow of a much larger, wealthier neighbor, which is part of the problem: infrastructure spending, hospital capacity, and job creation in the region gravitate toward Fes, leaving Sefrou’s cherry-growing agricultural economy (it hosts Morocco’s national Cherry Festival) as one of the few local income sources. Cherries are seasonal, which means seasonal income for a lot of households — good in June, thin the rest of the year.

7. Beni Mellal

Region: Beni Mellal-Khenifra. Population: around 210,000.

Beni Mellal is larger and more commercially developed than Khenifra, and the region overall is one of Morocco’s biggest olive-oil producers, sitting on fertile plains with real agricultural output. But regional wealth from olive and cereal production doesn’t distribute evenly — a lot of it concentrates with landowners and processors, while seasonal agricultural labor pays little and offers no security. Beni Mellal-Khenifra’s 9.8% regional poverty rate, the highest nationally as of 2024, sits alongside this city despite its relative size and infrastructure.

Close-up of hands picking olives from a tree branch in an olive grove.

8. Ouarzazate

Region: Draa-Tafilalet. Population: roughly 57,000 in the city.

Ouarzazate is the most economically diversified city on this list — it’s home to major film studios (this is where a lot of “desert” scenes in Hollywood productions get shot) and one of the world’s largest concentrated solar power plants, the Noor complex. That diversification is exactly why it ranks lowest on this list rather than off it entirely: film and solar-energy jobs are real, but they’re specialized, don’t employ huge numbers of local residents directly, and coexist with a surrounding province still built on subsistence farming and craft trades that haven’t scaled. The contrast between a solar mega-project and dirt roads ten minutes outside town is part of what makes Ouarzazate’s story different from Beni Mellal’s or Sefrou’s — visible modern investment, uneven distribution of what it produces.

The national picture

Morocco’s poverty story right now is one of real, measurable progress with a persistent regional lag. The country’s multidimensional poverty rate has roughly halved since the early 2000s, urban poverty is close to negligible, and even the worst-performing regions — Beni Mellal-Khenifra, Fes-Meknes — have posted meaningful improvements over the last ten years rather than stagnating. What hasn’t changed as fast is the geography: the interior, mountain, and pre-Saharan provinces that depend on rain-fed agriculture and water-stressed oases are still the places where a bad drought year shows up in household income almost immediately, while coastal and metropolitan Morocco has diversified into services, manufacturing, and tourism that cushion the same shocks.

If you’re researching this for travel planning rather than trivia: none of these cities are unsafe or unwelcoming to visit, and several — Zagora, Ouarzazate, Sidi Ifni — are genuinely worth the trip. What you’re seeing when you pass through isn’t collapse. It’s a provincial economy still catching up to the coast.