Regional Investment Centers: Twenty-Four Years of Reform, One Single Ambition

From the Royal Letter of 9 January 2002 to the most recent regulatory reform: how Morocco built, corrected and then strengthened its regional investment one-stop shop — and what remains to be done.

A system born of a clear political will (2002)

The Regional Investment Centers (CRIs) originate in the letter addressed by His Majesty King Mohammed VI to the Prime Minister on 9 January 2002, calling for the deconcentrated management of investment and the creation of a regional one-stop shop[1]. Sixteen centers were created, one per region — the administrative map then in force comprised 16 regions — under the authority of the Walis, with the mission of simplifying business creation and the processing of investment projects. Decree No. 2-03-727 of 26 December 2003 organizes their operation; the decree of 11 December 2009 governs their staff allowance scheme.

Legally, the CRIs were at that time Autonomously Managed State Services (SEGMA) — genuine management autonomy, but no legal personality of their own. Supervision (tutelle) lay with the Ministry of the Interior, through its Directorate of Economic Affairs, in coordination with the regional Walis.

Tangible results, but an institutional ceiling

The quantitative record of the first generation of CRIs is significant: business creations rose from 8,700 in 2003 to 26,271 in 2015 (around 270,000 over the period), processing times fell from two months to 2–6 days on average, and 29,700 investment projects worth MAD 1,922 billion were processed up to 2015. Twelve of the sixteen centers obtained ISO 9001 certification[2].

But the same evaluation by the Court of Accounts (January 2023) also documents the structural limits of the model: no common strategy among the 16 CRIs since their creation, only 4 centers with full administrative representation within the one-stop shop, 7 centers with no IT interconnection whatsoever with partner administrations despite the existence of the SI-INVEST system, no unified payment system for business creation fees, and a staff statute that remained incomplete[3]. The finding is clear: the tool works, but its institutional architecture has reached its limits.

2015: advanced regionalization reduces the number of CRIs from 16 to 12

Decree No. 2-15-40 of 20 February 2015, issued pursuant to Organic Law No. 111-14 on regions, redrew the Kingdom’s regional map and reduced the number of regions from 16 to 12[4]. The CRIs, whose locations strictly follow the regional map, were consolidated accordingly: it is this territorial reorganization — and not a decision specific to investment governance — that explains why Morocco today has 12 CRIs, one per region, rather than 16. The 2003–2015 data cited above, like the Court of Accounts statistics covering that period, therefore still refer to the former 16-center map; any comparison over time must account for this change in scope.

2017: an unsparing royal critique

It was in his Throne Day Speech of 29 July 2017 that King Mohammed VI delivered the harshest judgment ever publicly made on the first-generation CRIs: “For instance, the regional investment centers – with the exception of one or two – are a problem. They impede the act of investing instead of serving as a mechanism that provides incentives”[5]. This royal critique placed the overhaul of the CRIs at the top of the government agenda: the then Head of Government, Saad Dine El Otmani, submitted to the King a reform strategy that the executive described as a priority reform[6] — work that would lead, two years later, to Law 47-18.

2019: Law 47-18 changes the legal nature of the CRI

The reform introduced by Law No. 47-18 turned the CRIs into public establishments with legal personality and financial autonomy, governed by a board of directors that includes regional and private-sector representatives. Implementing Decree No. 2-19-67 of 17 April 2019 sets out the details.

The most structuring contribution of this law is the creation of the Unified Regional Investment Commission (CRUI), which replaces the previous patchwork of sectoral commissions with a single decision-making body. Its opinions must now be reasoned and enforceable, its meetings held at least weekly, and the maximum legal processing time is set at 30 days.

2020 onwards: digitalization through CRI-Invest

Alongside the legal reform, a dedicated electronic platform — CRI-Invest — has been rolled out progressively since 2020: it allows investors to submit a file, track its processing online and obtain administrative acts and authorizations without having to appear in person[7]. This digitalization responds directly to one of the weaknesses documented by the Court of Accounts: the lack of IT interconnection between the CRIs and partner administrations, and the limits of the SI-INVEST system then in place. In its formal response included in the Court’s report, the supervising ministry had in fact committed to developing “an electronic portal allowing investors to track their file” and a unified information system for the business creation one-stop shop[8] — a commitment that the general rollout of CRI-Invest fulfils, at least in part.

2022–2025: supervision shifts, the CRUI gains teeth

On 12 November 2022, the Minister of the Interior announced before Parliament the transfer of supervision of the CRIs from the Ministry of the Interior to the Ministry Delegate in charge of Investment, Convergence and Evaluation of Public Policies — then headed by Mohcine Jazouli — pursuant to Law 47-18 and in line with the National Investment Pact. The Walis retain a right of oversight, notably the power to request the re-examination of a rejected file.

Law No. 22-24, finally adopted in December 2024 and published on 20 January 2025, completes the framework: the CRUI’s opinions become fully binding; tighter deadlines are set (20 days for the CRUI’s decision, 10 additional days for administrative finalization, transmission of files by the CRI secretariat within 2 days, notice of meeting 5 days in advance); CRI directors are empowered to conclude investment agreements directly, under the governor’s oversight, for projects below MAD 250 million; the board of directors moves to two sessions a year, with a secretary-general position created to support the director; and a new appeals commission dedicated to investor disputes replaces the former recourse mechanism.

2026: the implementing decree completes the reform

Decree No. 2-26-564, recently published in the Official Bulletin, amends and supplements Implementing Decree No. 2-19-67 (2019) and thus closes, to date, the regulatory cycle opened by Law 22-24[9]. Signed by the Head of Government and countersigned by the Ministers of the Interior, Investment and Finance, this text formalizes the appeals commission provided for by the law: a ministerial commission chaired by the Head of Government himself, composed of the Minister of the Interior, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Investment and the Secretary General of the Government, with a maximum of 45 days to rule on an appeal. A technical pre-review committee, chaired by the Ministry of the Interior, examines files upstream; the secretariat of the appeals commission is also provided by that ministry. Article 4 of the decree further subjects the CRIs to the rules of the public procurement decree of 8 March 2023 — a notable point of budgetary discipline for public establishments only recently granted financial autonomy.

This decree clarifies a point that had remained unclear since the 2022 transfer of supervision: while political steering of the CRIs now rests with the Ministry of Investment, the Wali continues to chair the CRUI at regional level and to sign investment agreements, and the Ministry of the Interior remains at the heart of the appeals mechanism — both a member of the appeals commission and responsible for its secretariat and for the technical committee that feeds it.

WL Advisory Perspective

A reform built through successive correction: three legislative reforms, a digital platform and a major implementing decree in twenty-four years are not a sign of instability; on the contrary, they are the mark of a system steered by successively correcting its own blind spots, under constant political pressure since the royal critique of 2017. Each stage responded to the visible failure of the previous one — management autonomy without legal personality (2002) ran up against the absence of a common strategy and deficient IT interconnection; legal personality and the CRUI (2019), complemented by CRI-Invest digitalization (from 2020), ran up against non-binding opinions and decision circuits that were still too centralized; Law 22-24 and its 2026 implementing decree respond directly to these last two points, to the extent of finally giving concrete shape to the appeals procedure.

An appeal entrusted to the authority that holds the levers: keeping the Ministry of the Interior at the heart of this appeals procedure seems to us a sound design choice, not a brake on the convergence logic under way since 2022. An appeals mechanism has value only if it leads to a decision that is actually enforced on the ground — and it is the Ministry of the Interior, through the Wali, that retains hierarchical authority over the regional and local deconcentrated administrations on which the processing of an investment file depends in practice (urban planning, land, communal authorizations). Entrusting the secretariat and the technical pre-review of appeals to the authority that effectively holds the levers over these administrations, rather than to a sectoral ministry with no local hierarchical power, is what gives this appeal a real chance of succeeding — rather than being mere procedural window-dressing.

Regional execution, the blind spot of the text: what the law still does not say is how the scope of each reform will translate into regional execution capacity — which remains uneven, and on which, at this stage, we have essentially only official figures ending in 2015. Our reading, drawn from direct experience of similar reforms: the hardest part of an institutional reform is never the passing of the law or the publication of the decree; it is the capacity of the regional administration to absorb new deadlines, new digital tools and new responsibilities at the same pace everywhere. This is precisely the gap we will document in the next Brief in this series, devoted to the CRUI, and then in Brief No. 6, devoted to a benchmark of the communication of the 12 current CRIs.

Access to data, an unresolved issue: the number of files processed, their sectoral breakdown and, above all, their impact on employment broken down by province — or even by commune — are precisely the data that would allow an investor, a researcher or a local elected official to assess a CRI’s performance objectively, rather than relying on aggregate figures ending in 2015. Some CRIs today publish performance data on their own websites or in occasional activity reports; others publish nothing comparable. This unevenness no longer has any technical justification: since CRI-Invest is a unified platform across the 12 centers, the file-tracking data already exist in a single system. All that is missing is a standardized publication mechanism — a national dashboard, updated and broken down by region, province and commune — to turn a file-processing infrastructure into an infrastructure of public accountability. This is an issue that Law 22-24 and its 2026 implementing decree could have settled, and which they leave, for now, open.

What this means for you

For an investor: the legal framework governing your file today is no longer that of 2002, nor even that of 2019 — binding deadlines, online submission and tracking through CRI-Invest, decentralized signing of investment agreements and, now, a clearly equipped 45-day appeals procedure change the way a project must be prepared, sequenced and, where it is blocked, challenged. For an institution or a technical partner: this latest decree offers a concrete window to assess, region by region, whether the new legal deadlines — for the CRUI and the appeals commission alike — are actually met in practice, and to call for the publication of updated official statistics, the latest available public data dating back to 2015. The gap between the text and its execution remains the number-one point of vigilance.

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Sources

[1]Letter from His Majesty King Mohammed VI to the Prime Minister, 9 January 2002, on the deconcentrated management of investment. Maroc.ma.

[2]Court of Accounts of the Kingdom of Morocco, Evaluation of the Experience of the Regional Investment Centers (Évaluation de l’expérience des Centres Régionaux d’Investissement), report published in January 2023 (data covering the 2003–2015 period).

[3]Court of Accounts of the Kingdom of Morocco, Evaluation of the Experience of the Regional Investment Centers, report published in January 2023, pp. 3, 13–15.

[4]Decree No. 2-15-40 of 20 February 2015 setting the number of regions, their names, their capitals and the prefectures and provinces composing them, issued pursuant to Organic Law No. 111-14 on regions.

[5]Speech of His Majesty King Mohammed VI to the Nation on the occasion of Throne Day, 29 July 2017 (official English text, Maroc.ma, “Full Text of Royal Speech on the Occasion of the Throne Day”).

[6]“Réforme des centres régionaux d’investissement : vers une gouvernance renforcée et unifiée”, Le360, and “Exclusif. CRI : ce que prévoit le projet de réforme”, Le360 — in which the government explicitly describes the project as a “chantier prioritaire” (priority reform).

[7]Regional Investment Center of Marrakech-Safi, 2020 activity report, cited by LeSiteinfo.com, “Marrakech : la plateforme ‘CRI Invest’ a contribué à la réduction du délai de traitement des dossiers d’investissement”, 14 March 2021; Maroc.ma portal, service page “Plateforme CRI-Invest”.

[8]Court of Accounts of the Kingdom of Morocco, Evaluation of the Experience of the Regional Investment Centers, report published in January 2023, ministry’s response, p. 19.

[9]Decree No. 2-26-564 amending and supplementing Decree No. 2-19-67, Official Bulletin No. 7530 of 30 July 2026.