Morocco remains Africa’s top-ranked country for remote work, according to NordLayer’s Global Remote Work Index (GRWI) — a ranking that dates to 2023 and, as of September 2026, has not been updated with a newer edition. Morocco scored 0.657 and placed 48th of 108 countries worldwide, ahead of Tunisia, Mauritius and South Africa, driven largely by unusually strong cybersecurity performance.
Dateline: Index published 2023 by NordLayer; verified as still the most recent edition as of September 2026.
The details
NordLayer, a cybersecurity company, builds the GRWI by scoring countries across four pillars: cyber safety, digital and physical infrastructure, economic safety, and social safety, then combining them into one overall score out of 1.000. In the 2023 edition — the most recent one published — Morocco earned an overall score of 0.657, ranking 48th of 108 countries and first in Africa, ahead of Tunisia, Mauritius and South Africa.
The standout number is cybersecurity: Morocco ranked 19th globally on cyber safety, ahead of Sweden, Singapore, Japan, Canada, the US and the UK, according to NordLayer. That’s a genuinely unusual result for a country at Morocco’s overall income level, and it’s the main reason Morocco’s total score outperforms its position on other pillars. Morocco ranked far lower on physical and digital infrastructure (72nd) and economic safety (57th), per the original GRWI 2023 dataset — meaning the country’s remote-work edge is concentrated in security and affordability rather than broad-based infrastructure.
We checked specifically for a 2024, 2025 or 2026 edition of the GRWI before republishing these figures, since presenting a superseded report as current is a common error in this kind of coverage. As of September 2026, NordLayer’s own index pages still show 2023 as the latest published edition, with no newer release announced. That makes these figures nearly three years old — still the best available data, but readers comparing Morocco to a country using more recent statistics should account for the gap.
Why it matters for Moroccan entrepreneurs and remote-work-minded investors
For Moroccan founders building distributed teams, and for international companies weighing Morocco as a nearshoring or remote-hiring base, the cybersecurity ranking is the figure worth remembering — it’s a credible, third-party signal that Morocco’s digital infrastructure for handling sensitive data compares favorably with far wealthier countries, which matters disproportionately for financial services, healthcare data processing, and other regulated remote-work arrangements. The weaker infrastructure and economic-safety scores are a useful reality check for founders pitching Morocco purely on cost: connectivity reliability and economic-safety perceptions (which factor in things like ease of doing business and legal protections) still lag the leading European and Gulf remote-work destinations Morocco increasingly competes with for distributed talent and nearshored teams.
What’s next
Confirmed: The 2023 GRWI remains NordLayer’s only published edition of the index as of September 2026, and Morocco’s Africa-leading rank and cybersecurity strength are direct citations from that dataset.
Speculative: We have no confirmation of when or whether NordLayer plans to publish a 2026 or later edition. If a new edition appears, Morocco’s ranking could move in either direction — its underlying digital and physical infrastructure investments (fiber rollout, data-center capacity) have continued since 2023, which would tend to help a future score, while other African markets have also been actively investing in similar infrastructure.
FAQ
Source: NordLayer Global Remote Work Index, 2023 edition (verified as still current as of September 2026).
