Days 10+11: We are in the news

New week, new insights. :) Welcome back to week 2 of my social sabbatical experience. We started our workday with a recap of the scope of work alignment that we had on Friday evening. As a consequence, we agreed that there is no big change to our scope but that we set our focus a little different. Before our understanding was that we create an impact analysis of the incubator and concentrate on the financial sustainability. While these aspects are still relevant, Adnane provided us with the guidance to take a closer look into how their main programs (Dare Inc., Dare Space and Tamkeen) can be scaled up. 

For this week, we separated our work, Janet will focus on Tamkeen and the overall financial model, Marek takes care of Dare Inc. and I am responsible for Dare Space. Dare Space is the co-working space of MCISE. Social entrepreneurs can go there to "connect and collaborate, share opinions and ideas, build partnerships, network, study and work". All of this for a daily, weekly or monthly rate. Specifically, I will take a closer look into the financial figures of the Dare Space, provide recommendations on how to increase the usage of the co-working space and to improve its profitability and finally provide guidance if and how the Dare Space concept might be expanded to other locations in Morocco.

After lunch Ahmed sent our electronic survey to the start-ups. With this survey, we want to gather all relevant information for our impact analysis. And we already got first results today, looking forward to go into them in more detail.

The rest of the day, we spent with two very interesting interviews. The first interviewee was Meriem, one of the trainers of Dare Inc. She is currently working on her PhD in social entrepreneurship and participates in the Training of Trainers program from MCISE. During the last years she organized some start-up events, was in a mentoring program in Germany and now works for the new work lab in Casablanca. Besides here personal experience she also shared with us one of the challenges of social entrepreneurs in Morocco: People start with a solution not with the problem. For example, there was a town where the women had to walk 1 1/2 hours to get water. An entrepreneur found a way to bring the water much closer to them. The next day his complete equipment was destroyed. Why? It was the only chance for the women to get out of the house to meet their friends and talk. This reminds me of one TED talk, I watched as part of the preparation: Ernesto Sirolli - "Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!". Finally, she also gave some input of how we could create additional value for the start-ups at MCISE: It would be good if there would be more full-time people for checking the progress of the start-ups and maybe a fixed assignment from mentors to mentees, so that the mentor knows its start-ups by heart from the very beginning until leaving the incubator.

The second interview was with Yassin who regularly uses the co-working Dare Space for his social start-up. Mainly, they come there for paperwork, reporting, meetings and help for accounting. For the usage fee they get internet, space usage, events and also consulting from Marwane and team. According to him, Dare Space is the only co-working space for social entrepreneurs in Morocco. He would appreciate some more services like how to find a market for the enterprises and advice for exporting of goods.

We ended our workday with very good news: Our Social Sabbatical team made it into the news!!!

SAP has organized its first SAP Social Sabbatical in Morocco, enabling 12 SAP employees to work with four local organizations to promote innovation, social entrepreneurship, economic growth, and employability of Moroccan youth. According to SAP Francophone Africa Managing Director Frederic Alran, the launch “provides local organizations with global skills and ideas to stimulate local development.”

http://cajnewsafrica.com/2017/10/13/sap-commits-to-youth-employment-in-morocco/ 

In the evening, I met a German woman, Stefanie, that has lived in Morocco for the last 8 years. She had her own farming business and now organizes events. It was nice to hear from her in general about living and working in Morocco.   

Today we went on with our separate work streams. In addition, we met with the Enactus team to align on each other's scope and to also discuss some of our ideas with them. You might remember that not only Enactus has a strong partnership to MCISE but also Adnane is with Enactus and MCISE.

Let me close today's post with one shot from our daily morning run that became our working day routine.

Sunrise behind Mausoleum