2023 POLICY ROADMAP

Real GDP in Morocco was expected to have grown by 3.5% in 2023, helped by a favourable harvest
after the disastrous drought the year before. Most macroeconomic data are in the “green”: there is sustainable inflation, forecast at 5% in 2023, compared to almost 7% in 2022, despite an increase in interest rates by the Central Bank, with its attendant risk of limiting lending and investment opportunities for small businesses.

To encourage greater entrepreneurial dynamism, public authorities have launched a number of major programs to help entrepreneurs and unemployed young people. The new “Forsa” program in Morocco aims to finance and support 10,000 new entrepreneurs, while the “Awrach” plan is designed to secure temporary employment for up to 250,000 young Moroccans.

2023 Framework Conditions Review1

The quality of the overall entrepreneurial environment in Morocco had been slowly improving since 2020, though it faltered in 2023.

In Morocco, scores for eight of 13 Entrepreneurial Framework Conditions (EFCs) increased in 2023 compared to 2022, while five scores decreased. Most changes were small, with the biggest increase for Government Policy: Support and Relevance. The largest fall was for Entrepreneurial Finance. As with many economies, the Entrepreneurial Education at School was by far the lowest score. Physical Infrastructure was the highest.

In 2020, Morocco ranked 39th out of 50 GEM economies, scoring 3.8 for the quality of its overall entrepreneurial environment amidst the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. By 2022, that score had improved to 4.3, ranking Morocco 35th of 51 economies. The mixture of some increases and some decreases in individual framework condition scores left that overall score unchanged in 2023. Morocco is up
to 30th place in the overall National Entrepreneurial Context Index (NECI).

New questions in 2023 saw national experts assessing the quality of social support for women entrepreneurs, as well as their access to resources compared to male entrepreneurs. Morocco scored modestly in each, with a score of 2.9 for social support (ranked 41st) and a higher score of 4.9 for relative access to resources, ranked 29th.

2023 Entrepreneurial Activity Review

In the GEM Adult Population Survey (APS), four out of 10 adults in Morocco reported that their household income had declined in 2023, a high figure but lower than the six in 10 a year earlier and the seven in 10 in 2021.

Just under one in two Moroccan adults knew someone who had recently started their own business, the third lowest proportion in Level C. Seven out of
10 saw good opportunities to start a business locally, with only slightly less believing they had the skills and experience to start their own business. Of those seeing good opportunities, just under one in three would be deterred from starting their own business by the fear of failure, once more the third lowest in Level C. Nearly one in four of those intend to start their own business within the next three years.

The proportion of adults currently starting or running their own business was a modest 6.3%, up from 4.2% a year earlier but the lowest rate in Level C and third lowest in GEM 2023. Men were nearly twice as likely as women to be starting new businesses, and more than seven out of 10 of all new businesses were in consumer services. The Established Business Ownership rate was a little higher than that for new entrepreneurs, at 6.8%.

More than eight out of 10 new entrepreneurs agreed with the motivation to earn a living because jobs are scarce, and one in two expected to use more digital technologies in the next six months. Just one in 20 new entrepreneurs had customers beyond Morocco, and the proportion expecting to employ at least another six people was fairly high at just under one in five. The relatively low levels of new entrepreneurship meant that only about one in 100 Moroccan adults was starting or running a new business that expected to employ another six people or more over the next five years.

1 A brief description of the GEM approach is given in the footnote on p. 107.