Today we had a lesson on one of my favorite things, shopping, but it was not just any lesson. We actually learned where the goods we buy come from in Morocco. We primarily discussed the making of rugs and how the Anou cooperative is changing the supply chain to make it more beneficial for the craftspeople. When rugs are made in Morocco, women in rural villages make most of them, and they use wool, which tends to come from New Zealand, because it was not a profitable business to make wool here in Morocco. The women in these small villages would then give their rugs to middlemen so that they could sell them in bigger cities in souks. However, that meant that historically those women would only received 4% of the total profit, which is not a lot to live on. The Anou cooperative has instead cut out the middlemen so that the craftspeople can earn a living. They are doing this by having an artisan-owned model. It uses technology like phones so that women have a simple app they can upload pictures of their rugs to and then sell them online. Having a simple interface, it allowed women to be trained quickly and then be able to pass on their knowledge to other artisans, so the movement can keep growing, and the people can become more independent. I found it interesting that when we were discussing this, they talked about reaching out to West Elm because it is a well-known big furniture store in the US, and that they asked them why they were outsourcing rugs that were named Moroccan rugs to other countries to be made. The answer was actually simple, and it was because there was a lack of infrastructure when it came to sourcing the rugs and them being made. This led to them not only doing work in the rural communities of getting people online to sell their rugs, but they also worked on the wool problem and other infrastructure issues. They made a wool factory that did not use chemicals since that was an issue before, and they also figured out a way to keep color samples and formulas so that it would be slightly easier to make multiples of the same type of rug if that’s what a customer wants. This change is actually well above what the sellers who use harmful chemicals and make large orders of the same things.

Throughout this discussion, I really focused on my shopping habits. I typically do not worry about where my products were made, but I worry about the quality and how good the materials used to make them were. However, this opened up my eyes to the fact that many things are made in ways that harm the people who make them because they are taken advantage of. Hearing about the sweatshops in other countries that make goods for the US makes me want to know where my goods are coming from and how they were made. After learning about Anou it made me realize that shopping is never just shopping their is always a backstory. This made me curious about how different businesses get built and shape Morocco, which is what we started looking at the rest of the day to prep us for our site visits starting tomorrow.

In the second half of the day, we talked about startup culture in Morocco with the women who started Starlight, which we will see tomorrow when we tour the university. She talked about how in Morocco there are many barriers to startups because the culture is very much settled down, and finding a stable job instead of innovation and constantly changing like in the US. Looking at what startups are here was a major difference from the US. Startups tend to be things that work in Africa but tend not to work outside of Africa since the culture is different here. She also mentioned that in Morocco, most startups are ideas that benefit everyone and come out of need, instead of how in the US it tends to be about constantly pushing for new things or changing something for better benefits. This take on startups really is making me think about the site visits because when developing our projects, we have to take into account the cultural differences and how everything is linked together to really understand how Morocco is constantly developing. Today as a whole gave me a new lens to look at business through. I thought that the business practices used in the US were pretty universal, but the discussions show me today that is not the case, and that is something I cannot wait to explore further. Business is like the dialects of a language. It has the same basic principles, but the specifics are tied to each culture, just like how people in Morocco speak Darija, which is a form of Arabic instead of classical Arabic.