Morocco’s University Mohammed VI Polytechnic (UM6P) inaugurated Monday in New York its United States Global Hub in a bid to connect African talent and research ecosystems with global academic, entrepreneurial, and industrial partners.
This new UM6P Global Hub, with offices in New York and Cambridge (Massachusetts), reflects a deliberate approach to position Africa’s sustainable development ambitions within international hubs of knowledge, capital, and technology. It aims at deepening existing partnerships and developing new collaborations with U.S. universities and research centers and at opening structured pathways for joint research projects and academic exchanges.
Speaking at the inauguration ceremony of this new platform, the president of the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Hicham El Habti, said that this milestone reaffirms a steadfast commitment to fostering meaningful collaboration between Africa and wider knowledge and innovation ecosystems around the world.
This initiative was created with the singular focus to respond directly to Morocco and Africa’s pressing development challenges, by combining rigorous scientific research with practical, scalable solutions, enabling Morocco to build pathways toward technological sovereignty, he underlined, adding that it also builds a two ways bridge providing African start-ups and entrepreneurs with access to venture capital, technology networks, and industry expertise in North America, while creating channels for American innovations to be adapted and scaled in African contexts.
El Habti also pointed out that the United States offers a living example of how universities can serve as engines of innovation, highlighting that the ongoing collaborations with major U.S. based universities, including MIT, ASU, Stanford, Columbia Business School and others, span a wide set of research fields, with joint projects on climate agriculture, energy, and green mining, AI and green hydrogen, among other fields.
This U.S. Global Hub will also serve as a platform where African researchers can co-develop projects with U.S. counterparts without losing the connection to their home ecosystems, he added, underlining that the main objective is to build a university system that is anchored in Africa, globally connected, and operationally capable of tackling planetary challenges through the lens of African realities and opportunities.
For his part, the Director General of the American Global Hub, Mehdi El Khatib, noted that the establishment of UM6P in the United States illustrates the commitment to building bridges "so that African students, researchers and entrepreneurs can both benefit from and contribute to the global knowledge economy."
The idea is to build joint research projects to explore a variety of topics, critical for the sustainable development of the continent and provide a platform to train and connect African startups to the U.S. entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem, he indicated during this ceremony marked by the presence of Morocco’s Ambassador to the United States, Youssef Amrani and the Kingdom’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador Omar Hilale.
El Khatib also noted that on executive education, UM6P will develop two ways immersive programs educating about business and innovation in Africa and in the United States.
The inauguration ceremony of the new American Global Hub of UM6P was marked by the presence of several American personalities from the world of academic research and business, as well as skillful members of the Moroccan community based in the United States.
MAP: 09 September 2025
