Week 4: Pioneering Events

Our last week in Rabat is nearly over. What a week. I am really happy that I had the chance to be part of two amazing events: on Tuesday, we held our final presentation with our client and today we met Muhammad Yunus, the 'rock star' of social business at a panel discussion in Casablanca.

Due to meeting conflicts, our final presentation was surprisingly scheduled on Tuesday evening and not on Wednesday. Although we were really busy in finishing everything earlier, the good thing was that we had no time to get worried if we missed anything or to get nervous before the meeting. At 6 pm we came together at DARE space with Marwane, Ahmed and Adnane from MCISE and Malika and Mehdi from Pyxera to present our findings and recommendations to them. The recommendations were very well received and the feedback was super positive. All the work that we invested during the last 4 weeks was really worth it. Even better: The next day we learned that some of our recommendations were already considered in a new project proposal from MCISE. That's what the social sabbatical is there for: go out, listen to the needs of your client and provide support that can be realistically implemented.

Here is what we finally prepared as leave behinds: our presentation, extensive report with background on how we came to our conclusions and more details about the recommendations, an repetitive impact survey that should regularly be sent to the startups, an Excel-based dashboard that visualizes the repetitive survey results, our financial dashboard, the business model canvas and the transcript of the interviews we had with the entrepreneurs and mentors.

Janet presenting our deliverables

Me presenting the recommendations for Dare Space

Having fun after the presentation

Today we took the train to Casablanca. Reason was a panel discussion with Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Grameen bank, professor Muhammad Yunus to which MCISE invited us. I had very high expectations to this and all of them were exceeded. It was amazing to hear how professor Yunus values the power of youth, defines social businesses and what he thinks about capitalism.

When billionaires lose billions, they are still billionaires; if millionaires lose millions, they are still millionaires; but poor people always stay poor.

Professor Yunus on

• his career: When he created his bank, he knew nothing about banking. So he learned what conventional banks are doing and did it in an opposite way. This was the only way to try out new ways of doing banking.
• youth: That is the same with young people. If they are inexperienced and open to new learnings, it is their chance to go new roads. 'Don't pollute your mind. Everybody wants you to go the old route but you have to resist.' Our youth is the most powerful generation. They are all superhumans. They just don't realize because they look like everybody else.
• capitalism: We nearly have a world population of 8 billion people. But 1% of the people owns 99% of the money. 8 people own more many than 50% of the world population together. This is wrong. If people need money from the banks, they have to show that they already have a certain amount of money to get more. But we have to also support people that don't have any money and need a credit. We were told that the big banks are too big to fail, but the poor people are too small to notice. Jobs are obsolete. We should not search for jobs but instead create businesses. Human beings are problem solver and not born to work for somebody else. Jobs are the end of creativity.
• his new book: He introduced his new book 'A World of Three Zeroes: the new economics of zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero carbon emissions' in which he shows his radical economic vision for fixing the broken capitalist system.
• social businesses: Social businesses do business to solve people's problems. We have to stop to create businesses to get rich. Humans are always struggling between selfishness and selflessness. Capitalism is pure selfishness. When creating our own business, we have to bring together selfishness and selflessness. It is up to everybody to choose where to position his business on the scale between the two extremes of selfishness and selflessness.

I hope, you get a feeling from the summary above on how inspiring that talk was. Thanks, MCISE, for making this possible. 

Us presenting the 3 sustainable development goals the SAP CSR strategy focuses on

Panel discussion with professor Yunus

Priyanka with professor Yunus

We used the afternoon to walk through Casablanca and visit the King Hassan II. Mosque, the third-biggest mosque in the world, providing space for 25,000 people inside and 80,000 people in front of the mosque.

From which movie is this quote?

Tomorrow we will have our closing event with all the clients and the respective SAP teams. On the one hand I am looking forward to come back home to friends and family, but on the other hand I will miss the social sabbatical gang including Malika and Mehdi and of course the collaboration with Marwane, Ahmed, Adnane and all of the entrepreneurs here in Rabat, not to forget the great Moroccan food.