A Moroccan student has won the country’s first silver medal at the International Olympiad in Informatics, one of the world’s biggest coding competitions for school students.
Zakaria Abisourour finished 63rd out of 375 students at this year’s competition in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He scored 332.42 points out of 600, enough to win a silver medal.
The silver medal required at least 303.28 points. Gold started at 361.12 points.
Abisourour finished ahead of more than 80% of the students who took part.
The result is also a big improvement from last year. At the 2025 competition in Sucre, Bolivia, he scored 228 points and finished 190th out of 330 students. He received an honourable mention.
This year, he scored 104.42 more points and moved up 127 places in the rankings.
He scored 47, 36, 100, 75, 70.42 and four points on the six problems in this year’s competition. He got a full 100 points on the third problem.
Morocco sent four students to the 2026 competition.
Mohammed Cherki finished 216th with 198.50 points and received an honourable mention. Yassir Salama finished 232nd with 176.05 points, while Mohamed Aada came 307th with 77.64 points.
The competition gave out 32 gold medals, 62 silver medals and 94 bronze medals. A further 43 students received honourable mentions.
The International Olympiad in Informatics brings together secondary-school students from around the world. Students compete alone in two five-hour sessions. They solve problems that test programming, algorithms and data structures.
The result comes as Morocco puts more focus on coding, artificial intelligence and other digital skills.
The Digital Morocco 2030 strategy has a budget of 11bn dirhams, about $1.1bn. The plan aims to train 100,000 young people for digital jobs each year and create 240,000 technology jobs by 2030.
The government also wants the digital economy to account for 15% of GDP, up from 5%.
A new Morocco Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence was also launched in 2026. The programme gives school students training in areas such as machine learning, neural networks and Python programming.
The country is also trying to build a stronger technology and gaming industry.
Morocco set up its first official national pavilion at Gamescom 2026 in Cologne, Germany. Eleven Moroccan gaming companies presented their work at the event.
Artificial intelligence is also being used in public services. The Directorate General for National Security has deployed AI-powered patrol vehicles in Casablanca to help with traffic management and security monitoring.
Two Moroccan universities, Hassan II University of Casablanca and Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, also entered the top 1,000 of the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2026.
