Rabat Days 3+4: First-hand information

Yesterday, the social sabbatical was officially kicked off. All local clients came together in our hotel to meet their team and to introduce their organization to the other teams: USAID career center, Enactus, StartUp Maroc and MCISE. The event was started with an introduction about CSR at SAP by Sarah, our mentor, and Nabil from SAP Morocco, followed by an introduction on Pyxera from Kelsey. Together with our client, we also met our project assistant, Wissam, who supports us in translating French into English whenever needed.

Kelsey Figone talking about Pyxera

MCISE team (from left): Janet, Marek, me, next to us on the right Marwane from MCISE

After the event, we headed over to the MCISE office, where we had a very interesting session with Marwane. He explained to us the history of MCISE, its structure and offerings and finally covered a lot of details about our scope for the next weeks.

MCISE was founded in 2012 and started the Dare Inc. program, our main focus, in 2015. The name Dare Inc. was chosen by purpose with reference to the Arabic word for house and the English verb "to dare". Besides Dare Inc. MCISE offers different other services, e.g. Dare Space, an office space for projects and Wuluj, a crowdfunding platform.

Dare Inc. is a 1-year-program that supports social start-ups from idea face to scaling. The year consists of two phases: the acceleration phase is split in 4 tracks from ideation to business plan creation. The scaling phase covers mainly mentoring by experts and networking.

Prototyping area

MCISE outside area

Dare Inc. shop with products from Dare Inc. start-ups

Today morning we sat together with Ahmed, who is responsible for Dare Inc. Together with him we detailed out all the aspects of the incubation program. The afternoon we spent with structuring the information that we received so far and discussing different focus topics for the next couple of days, e.g. creating a business model canvas or working on a project plan.

Before leaving for Dinner, we had the chance to meet the founder of MCISE, Adnane, a real visionary on social innovation. When you talk to someone in Morocco about social entrepreneurship, he for sure has a connection with Adnane. It was inspiring to listen to his vision about social entrepreneurship in general and about MCISE specifically. He is driven to help start-ups overcoming the missing support from government and companies. According to him, they have the models at hand that work, now it is time for scale. That's exactly why we are there.

Talk with Adnane

We finished the day having a joined dinner with the Enactus team and Adnane, as Adnane is also working with Enactus. Talking about dinner: we could have also titled these two days "Feeding Marek". If you want to make him happy, just provide him the right amount of food with good taste at the perfect time. :)

After the first days with MCISE I am sure about one thing: lack of information won't be our problem. :) Marek brought up one nice metaphor: "When you start cleaning your house, it might first be looking worse than before". For sure, we will use the next days for collecting more information and analyzing it, so that we can finalize our scope for the next weeks.

As a whole SAP team, we already developed two rituals: trying out different restaurants and all kind of food and our daily morning run to compensate the food.

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed!