Selection Morocco

Station A

Our project “Station A Corporation” aims to develop a hyperlocal entrepreneurship ecosystem of labelled AEs (auto-entrepreneurs) & VSEs (very small enterprises) operating in services to the industry. We aspire to contribute to the development and strengthening of local networks of the AEs & VSEs around the various trades of services to industry and facilitating their access to industrial customers and the state market. Through this integrated and meaningful platform, we aim to incubate, support and integrate with our community of more than 6.000,00 entrepreneurs (AEs & VSEs).

The Problem

The problem of access to the market remains a point that uniformly affects the majority of small enterprises and especially auto-entrepreneurs (Aes) (out of 370,000.00 less than 40% are active).

The local networks of auto-entrepreneurs around the various professions lack the opportunity to scale their business as they cannot easily access industrial customers and state markets.

In addition to the difficulty of access to the market, the majority of the entrepreneurial support program is exclusive and their offer remains limited in time.

Many factors affect the lower rate of participation of AEs and VSEs in industrial trade, and affect also the lower impact of entrepreneurial support programs initiated by public or private institutions. These initiatives give birth to precarious entrepreneurs with great vulnerability who have a problem of access to the market and even more a problem of survival.

The main challenges that AEs and VSEs face are threefold:

1. Problem of access to the industrial and state market

AEs and VEs are disproportionately affected by trade barriers and inefficiencies resulting from trade policy, namely technical standards and regulations, logistics processes and services, customs and other administrative trade procedures.

2. Exclusive and generic entrepreneurial support programs

There is a big problem with access for young entrepreneurs to entrepreneurial support programs offers which are mostly exclusive and limited in time (between 3 to 12 months maximum).

The service offers are generally articulated around soft-skills training and at most with support for access to financing.

Trades training and continuous support are absent from this type of program, which over time has created a skills gap for the entrepreneurs and makes them more vulnerable to failure.

3. Digital

For various reasons, VSEs have limited access to various digital tools and therefore remain vulnerable in relation to a geographically too limited market.

The Solution

Our ambition is to create an entrepreneurship and business platform in which we will support and integrate a thousand AEs & VSEs.

We are developing an open-service platform. We innovate every day to develop services for businesses and individuals ranging from facility management, maintenance & repair;  service to industry, consulting, and digital training.
We already have more than 60 types of services and professions, for each type of service, we intend to recruit, transform and integrate more than 10 young people in each region, i.e. more than 600 young people per region (12 regions in Morocco).

We have a well-defined ten-step process that allows us to manage and successfully integrate young people into our ecosystem:

  1. Identify in the regions of intervention of the aggregator, a population of potential auto-entrepreneurs at the local level with business skills;
  2. Encourage their economic integration with registration in the national register of auto-entrepreneurs;
  3. Assess skills with a pre-qualification process for interested persons;
  4. Establish a collective development plan for practical and fun business skills, based on the acquisition of experience from the aggregator, seniors and its industrial partners within the framework of two complementary programs: an entrepreneurship program and a business skills development program;
  5. Label auto-entrepreneurs who have reached a minimum level of qualification;
  6. Contracting with labeled local auto-entrepreneurs to enable them to access the aggregator’s customers,
  7. Automate the monitoring of the post-intervention performance of the auto-entrepreneurs who are partners of the aggregator to ensure additional training plans and ensure the satisfaction of industrial customers;
  8. Inoculate industrial culture into local networks of qualified subcontractors who share the same human and professional values;
  9. Activate partnership levers to prepare an entrepreneurial ecosystem around these local networks integrating banks, insurance companies, foundations and other partners to complete the value offer of the aggregator;
  10. Empower and eventually franchise auto-entrepreneurs who have developed autonomy in project management beyond business skills with their transformation into legal entities.

Additionality

It is likely that with CFYE support, the project will be better designed, proceed more quickly, or reach more young people than it otherwise would have. CFYE support will allow us to accelerate the development of our business model.

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