Today we learned about the Anou cooperative, a women artisan cooperative here in Morocco, and I will be honest it was one of the more eye opening business talks I have sat through. The model is really simple but in the best way possible. 80% of the profits go directly back to the artisans themselves, and the remaining 20% gets reinvested into education, spaces, and materials for the people making the rugs. What really got me though was how much control the women have over the entire process, they oversee the materials they use for the rugs themselves specifically to make sure no extra chemicals sneak in from outside wool suppliers. And because of all of this, a lot of these women are now going back to their villages making more money than the men, and it really just shows how much money determines power at the end of the day. The moment women started earning more, the dynamic shifted, and that says a lot about how power actually works regardless of where you are in the world. It made me think about how I personally approach buying things, and honestly I have never really stopped to think about where my products come from or who made them. I usually just care about whether the quality is good and move on. Hearing about Anou made me realize that the person behind the product and the process behind the price tag are worth paying attention to.

The ecosystem lecture also gave me a lot of context going into my upcoming site visit at the Technopark in Casablanca. Before this trip I did not really have a clear picture of what Morocco’s tech and startup scene looked like, and I think that is pretty common for people who have never thought about Morocco as a hub for innovation. But it actually has been building toward that for a while now. Technopark has been around for an while and operates as both an incubator and a business hosting facility, supporting startups primarily in information technology and more recently renewable energy. Since then it has supported more than 1,800 young companies across IT, green tech, and creative industries. What I find interesting going into the visit is how a place like Technopark and a cooperative like Anou are doing really different things but are kind of solving the same problem, which is figuring out how to build something sustainable that actually puts money and power back into the hands of the people doing the work.

Then after a full day of lectures and a lot to think about, a few of us found ourselves at a beach cafe and I think that was exactly what we needed. We shared a pizza, split a crepe between us, and I got an iced tea pina colada that I am still thinking about. We ended the day with a debrief back at my host family’s house and then fully committed to bed rotting, which after everything this week I think we have more than earned it.