SAP Shoroq in Morocco

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 alread...

Week 3 is already over? Time was flying by already before but this week felt like a day.  The week started with an interview with Amid, one of the mentors. He coaches the startups in communication, marketing and business strategy. After working with Maroc Telecom, he started working as a freelancer to support companies like MCISE with mentoring. He joined MCISE a year ago. Generally he meets the startups once a month for 2 hours. Last year, he supported 25 startups at MCISE. According to him their biggest challenge is the long-term vision and to think big. He is working as a mentor because he is challenged himself, he enjoys the contact with these young entrepreneurs and he loves their stories. Before he joined MCISE, he didn't know about social entrepreneurship at all, so he learned a lot from his first engagements. Finally, he left an advice for MCISE: he recommends to open up additional branches in Fès, Casablanca and especially Tangier as their are most of the internationa...

The last three days we were busy with analyzing all the information that we collected so far. Marek built a dashboard containing all the costs and how the money is spent. In addition, we included data about the start-ups like the total number of start-ups, if they received the seed funding and the number of jobs they created. From all these data we could derive further KPIs: how much did a job cost, how much money is needed to reach the overall goal until 2020 and much more. Janet went on with the work on Tamkeen. Tamkeen Initiative is an awareness program with the objective to promote social entrepreneurship and social innovation in public high schools. At last, I finished a first draft of the Dare Space analysis together with clear recommendations what should be changed to make it even more attractive than before. Example data from our dashboard I want to use the chance to tell you about some of the nice start-ups that are incubated within Dare Inc. We sat together with them i...

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, wee...

The first work week is already over. Unbelievable how fast time went by. I want to close the week with less work details but instead with 2 nice events. But let's first cover work shortly. Today was all about wrapping up the tasks we started: Finishing the survey, scope of work and market research. In the afternoon we went through all of the results with Marwane, Ahmed and later Adnane to get feedback on the scope for the remaining 3 weeks and also on the Business Model Canvas and the survey questions. It turned out that they were quite happy that we worked on a Business Model Canvas as they haven't done one for MCISE before although they have teached this since years. We learned as well that we also have to incorporate some updates into the scope and to add some more detailed questions to our survey. So our plan of sending that out to the start-ups didn't work out, we have to finish that early next week latest. By the way, we got introduced on the MCISE Facebook p...

The last two days were flying by quickly. To stick with the metaphor from the days before, we were still busy with cleaning up the house. But day by day everything gets clearer and we have quite a good understanding of the ecosystem, we are working in. Wednesday morning started with an insight of the financial details of MCISE. This helped us to get the context for our task about the financial sustainability. In the afternoon we split our tasks: Janet prepared our project plan and refined some details of the scope of work, Marek collected questions for our impact survey and I created a Business Model Canvas for MCISE. The canvas helps us to structure the key partners, resources, communication channels, value proposition, etc. and list the main cost drivers and revenue streams. Before leaving the office, we sat together and went through all our results to incorporate everybody's feedback. I should not forget to mention our special guest, a cute cat from the neighborhood, that w...

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...

Today we had the announcement of our subteam, the assignment to our local client and the introduction of our Scope of Work. I was so excited and could not wait to get more information about our work in Rabat!  For the project work in Morocco the twelve SAP colleagues are split into subteams of three people each. This is my team: Janet Brewer from the USA and Marek Garbos from UK will work together with me. After our first calls over Skype, I am really looking forward to work closely with these two. Together we will support the local client MCISE (Moroccan Center for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship). MCISE logo They describe themselves as "a not-for-profit dedicated to finding entrepreneurial and innovative solutions to every social challenge in Morocco. It was founded in 2012 by a group of 17 people enthusiastic about social change in Morocco.We believe that supporting social entrepreneurs with system-changing ideas can provide benefits for Morocc...