The Hungarian Foreign Minister, Péter Szijjártó and Abdellatif Miraoui, the Moroccan Education Minister have signed an agreement which ensures an increasing number of grants for Moroccan students, as the number of students from this country increases rapidly across Hungarian universities.
According to MTI, the new agreement includes increasing grants for students from Moroccan from 150 to 165 during the 2023 and 2025 period. In addition, Hungarian universities plan to send teachers to hold classes at Moroccan universities, Genefconsults reports.
During this meeting, Szijjártó noted that in the last year, a total of 1,151 students from Morocco have enrolled in Hungarian higher education institutions, marking the highest record of these students recorded so far. This also indicates that the standard of Hungarian higher education is getting recognised internationally, as the Minister emphasised.
He also pointed out how the war in Ukraine has affected both, Morocco and Hungary, as most of the wheat imports come from Ukraine and Russia. He also noted that like Hungary, Morocco wants to restore peace with Ukraine as soon as possible.
The Hungarian minister also mentioned illegal migration, as one of the challenges that have to be addressed throughout 2021, noting that Morocco has an important role to play in this situation.
“The experience we have gained over the past six to seven years is that migration pressure eases if there is stability in North Africa. This is why we highly esteem stable countries in the region, a line of defence for Europe, Morocco among them,” the foreign minister said.
Hungary also intends to continue helping as its embassy serves as a liaison between Morocco and NATO this year as well as continued development of cooperation as bilateral trade increases by 16 per cent, to a record of $300 million.
Hungary offers free of charge education for its citizens, while in 2020, the budgetary institutions’ total expenditure reached 1.8 trillion forints, representing 3.8 per cent of the country’s national budget. At the same time, consumer spending on education reached $1.3 billion and increased to a further $1.5 billion in 2021.