Entrepreneurship and youth employment in the context of Morocco: an empirical evaluation of the FORSA program

Youth entrepreneurship programs have become a standard policy response to high unemployment across the developing world, but we know relatively little about how well they work in the MENA region or what determines whether they produce lasting ventures rather than transient self-employment. This paper examines Morocco’s FORSA program (Formation et Reconversion pour la Sécurisation de l’Avenir), a large Active Labor Market Policy that pieces together vocational training, job placement and entrepreneurship support for unemployed youth. Using administrative records on 1,500 beneficiaries enrolled between 2022 and 2024, we estimate logistic regression models with year fixed effects to identify what drives labor market insertion and whether placements last. Self-employment accounts for 58.6% of those placed, which raises the question whether FORSA is creating real entrepreneurial ventures or mostly channeling people into informal self-employment of the necessity-driven kind. The gross insertion rate is 58.3%, but only 59% of placements hold for at least six months, giving a net durable employment rate around 34%. Neither the duration of training nor the provision of support services has any detectable effect on either margin. These findings run counter to the logic that underpins most ALMPs in the region and suggest that effective entrepreneurship support demands something more systemic connecting human capital investments to improvements in institutional quality and market access rather than training programs that operate in isolation.