Today was a busy day. We had two very different speakers: a women’s artisan cooperative called Anou and a lecture on the development of Morocco’s startup ecosystem. They don’t seem related on the surface, but by the end of the day, I kept finding myself making connections between the two. Anou immediately caught my attention. The cooperative works with women in the mountains in the rural areas who make handmade carpets and other products, a demographic that has always been underrepresented and, frankly, exploited. Anou’s model differs because it cuts out the middlemen who have traditionally taken the lion’s share of the profits. The statistic that stuck with me was that in the conventional supply chain, merchants were walking away with about 96% of the revenue, while the women doing the actual work were left with almost nothing. That change alters the dynamic. Most of what is made by artisans is kept, and the platform provides personalized shopping experiences that link customers directly to the people behind the products. Their app impressed me too. It felt intuitive and accessible, and that is important when you’re trying to bring people into a digital marketplace that they may not have had access to before. The entire model is based on connection, and I think that’s what makes it work.
That also made me think about my habits. I don’t often think about where the things I buy are coming from. It’s hard to avoid in the US. Supermarkets and big retailers make everything look so seamless and cheap, and that convenience kind of numbs you to the process behind it. Being in the medina has started to change my perspective. When everything is out in the open, handmade and sold by the maker, it’s hard not to think about the hands behind the product. I want to bring that consciousness home with me. The lecture on ecosystems gave a different perspective. The biggest takeaway for me was how much COVID accelerated Morocco’s tech infrastructure. I never considered the pandemic to be a forcing mechanism for the digital development here. I hear a lot about the disruption that COVID caused in the U.S., but hearing how it pushed Morocco into one of its biggest leaps in tech growth reframed that narrative for me. I think it’s worth keeping in mind when we go into our site visits and projects that a lot of these startups are still young. They’ve grown fast and under unusual circumstances. There’s still a lot of runway left, and I think that’s actually exciting.