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‘Everyone for herself:’ Managing Insurance Premiums in Rural Moroccan Cooperatives
Abstract
In 2020, in the opening of the Moroccan parliamentary session, King Mohammed VI called for expanding access to ‘universal compulsory health coverage,' through the integration of self-employed workers, including small farmers and cooperative members, into a health insurance policy administered by the National Social Security Fund (صندوق ضمان الاجتماعي, CNSS). It was not until 2023, however, that many rural producers and cooperative members were informed that they had been enrolled in the program – and would now be expected to pay monthly health insurance premiums. This reform was just the latest in the restructuring of the CNSS and other state entitlements and services in Morocco since the 1980s. These reforms have resulted not only in the withdrawal of state programs and increasing privatization, but in a kind of 'predatory inclusion' (Taylor 2019) of the poorest citizens, including through formalizing rural property and employment and increasing taxation and payments. This paper examines the roll-out of the CNSS in three women's weaving cooperatives in the Middle Atlas Mountains, with differing outcomes for members' income. It considers structural factors which shaped these outcomes, as well as debates within these cooperatives as to how payments should be distributed within the cooperatives, as well as what they 'purchased.' Examining vernacular understandings of entitlements and insurance, this paper then considers tensions over distributive politics and who is - or ought to be - paying their share in a context of neoliberal reform.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Morocco
Sub Area
None