"Introducing Management Development and Training in North Africa"

In a geopolitical context, Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia) is a very interesting and unexplored case regarding the post-war development of management education and development. The countries became independent from France, the region was rich on core resources for the growth of the global economy (e.g. oil and gas in Algeria, phosphate in Morocco), and Algeria developed links to Soviet while Morocco’s looked towards the USA. This paper explores how the International Labour Organization (ILO) from the 1960s followed by the Ford Foundation in the 1970s made efforts to develop organizations for management training and development in the Maghreb region with a focus on Morrocco. The weak representations of US business schools that were active in other parts of the world to offer management education, gave the ILO an opportunity to play a pioneering role in this region by for example supporting the founding of Management Training Institute in Casablanca in the 1960s. In the 1970s, the Ford Foundation strengthened its work in the region by for example supporting the North African Management Associations financially from 1974.
The results of these efforts were mixed. The paper will identify and analyze the ILO and the Ford Foundation’s plans for the regions, how they executed the plans, how they interacted with the USAID’s activities in the region, and their dialogue with local actors such as the government, business, and – in the case of the ILO - the weak labor force and business entrepreneurs. By doing this, we will show how research on this topic in an African context challenges existing theories and knowledge on the global development of management education.
The paper is based on research in the ILO, the USAID and the Ford Foundation’s archives as well as Moroccan archives.