Up to one million tourists are expected to visit Morocco during the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations.

While the tournament has witnessed brilliance on field actions, economic growth and global attention — it also triggered a surge in demand for prostitution as tourists seek to satisfy their sexual desires during their stay in the North African country.

Despite Morocco being an Islamic country, where the oldest profession is strictly illegal and punishable with even up to one-year imprisonment, prostitutes in the country have always found a way to conduct their business, especially as AFCON is ongoing, with two sources who spoke to Peoples Gazette, stating that the tournament created spike in the demand for their services.

According to one of the sources, the activities of prostitutes are not explicit in Morocco as in less conservative countries, adding that there are regulations in Morocco, prohibiting an male individual from lodging in the same room with Moroccan women unless there are legal documents to prove relationships between them.

However, the rules are not enforced when it comes to foreign women, the source added, stating “they will look away whenever the women you are with are not Moroccans.”

Though there are these restrictions, Moroccan women, mostly young adults, have devised ways to circumvent the obstacles by taking their trades to nightclubs, where it is easier to meet prospective clients away from the prying eyes of the authorities, The Gazette gathered.

The source told The Gazette that his friend from Nigeria, in town for the AFCON, patronised a prostitute when he arrived, noting that the price ranges between 300 Moroccan dirham (N48,000) and 1,500 dirham (N240,000)—depending on the duration and the prostitute’s likeness for the client.

While prostitution is largely frowned upon in main cities such as Rabat and Casablanca, the trade is relatively lenient in places such as Tangier, which the source described as the ‘hotspot of olosho’ and Agadir, especially in the former, attributed to the city being close to Europe thus people in the region are viewed as being ‘Europeanised.’

“My friend patronised one Moroccan lady last week,” the source said. “He met the girl at the nightclub in Casablanca so she charged him 300 dirham for the night as she liked him.”

On the way to resolve the lodging restrictions to host clients, the source said that the local prostitutes “know the apartments to go where relationship documentation will not be required.”

The second source, a man in his mid-30s from Ivory Coast who has been living in Morocco for many years, provided our correspondent with a site (withheld for publicity reasons), where prospective customers can shop for prostitutes in the country.

He, however, stressed that one cannot invite them to one’s hotel but must first meet at a location where both parties would negotiate before heading to a lodge sanctioned by the prostitute to avoid documentation as earlier stated.

These revelations came amid a recent report by the United States government that ranked Morocco as one of the top countries in the world where trafficking is still prevalent, citing different scenarios in which victims were forced into sex work by family, intermediaries and traffickers.

The report titled, ‘2025 Trafficking in Persons Report: Morocco’ by the state department placed the North African country in Tier 2 on its ranking, highlighting that though Morocco had implemented some measures to tackle human trafficking, the country is still a playground for traffickers.

The report said that 452 people were identified by Moroccan authorities as potential trafficked victims last year, with the government’s referral mechanism later confirming 229 of them as indeed trafficked, which is a significant increase from 169 confirmed cases in 2023.

Of the total potential victims, 259 were suspected of being sex trafficking victims, 78 were potential forced labour victims, and 115 identified as possible victims of unspecified forms of trafficking.

The report noted that the profiles of the victims varies, including individuals, especially young boys, who are from Morocco and others forcefully brought into the country to work as child labourers. Traffickers, who can sometimes be parents and other intermediaries, also exploit Moroccan children in Morocco for sexual exploitation.

In perpetrating their crimes, the traffickers target vulnerable Moroccan girls living in rural areas, luring them with the promise of regular financial assistance to cater for their basic needs. Likewise, some foreign nationals, primarily from Europe and the Middle East, engage in extraterritorial commercial child sexual exploitation and abuse in major Moroccan cities, the report said.

The U.S. government’s report specifically mentioned Tangier, earlier identified by our source, stating that accounts by non-governmental organisations detailed that traffickers forcefully kept children in vacation homes owned by Europeans in the city, where they were exploited for sexual benefits.

The report also stated that both “documented and undocumented foreign migrants, especially women and children, are highly vulnerable to forced labor and sex trafficking in Morocco and as they transit through Morocco to reach Europe.”