Research and Education for Sustainable Resource Development in Africa
The University Mohammed VI Polytechnic—MIT Research Program (UMRP) was launched at MIT in 2016 to pursue the knowledge and expertise critical for a future of sustainable resource development in Africa, while also helping build capacity at Morocco’s new flagship African university for the 21st century—UM6P. Our vibrantly collaborative research community is built around an evolving set of strategic projects focused on addressing pressing sustainability challenges for the continent, including: climate change, water supply and management, smart and precision agriculture, renewable energy and green phosphate processing.
Each project is led by an MIT faculty Principal Investigator directing a dedicated team of MIT graduate students and post-docs in close collaboration with a complementary team of colleagues at UM6P. These collaborations explicitly expand the scope of the research while leveraging the strengths of both institutions. In particular, they take advantage of MIT’s expertise in theory, modeling and bench-scale demonstration, and of UM6P's network of "Living Laboratories" for proof-of-concept testing, development and upscaling. These facilities include the Experimental Farm, Phosphate Mine, Chemical Processing Facility, Water Capture Facility, Green Energy Park and even the urban co-evolution of UM6P’s flagship campus within its host city of Ben Guerir.
Sponsored by OCP Group S.A. of Morocco—the phosphate mining, processing and sustainable agriculture conglomerate—UMRP generates targeted, tangible progress in research at on a range of issues critical to the future of Africa and the world even as it helps to nurture the evolution of UM6P itself. In May 2024, UMRP was renewed until 2030 with an expanded mandate to grow the number and potential scale of its projects while adding a Post-doctoral Program aimed at bringing scholars from Morocco and Africa to MIT for training and mentoring critical to their growth as the faculty of the future at UM6P and beyond.
Stay tuned…
About UM6P
Learn more about University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Ben Guerir, Morocco.
About MIT
Learn more about the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massacusetts.
