Early Stage Funds Engaging Green Ventures in Morocco & International Impact Investor Matching

The objective of IFC’s Morocco Climate Entrepreneurship project was to contribute to unlocking clean technology markets in Morocco by building the capacity of the Cluster Solaire and Moroccan ecosystem players to support green ventures in Morocco. This, in turn, helped contribute to creating high-quality jobs in the sustainable energy and other cleantech sectors while helping Morocco mitigate and adapt to climate-related challenges through local solutions and stimulating growth.

Many of the pieces necessary for a climate entrepreneurship ecosystem were in place in Morocco, including active support organizations, a willing government, education and research centers with potential for impact, and investment from the domestic and international community. Morocco’s entrepreneurship ecosystem was made up of a few local and international support organizations, many of which were concentrated in the early-stage support space (i.e., Startup Maroc, Espace Bidaya, Impact Lab/Numa, etc.), most of which had emerged recently, particularly after the GES summit in 2014.

A robust climate entrepreneurship ecosystem had strong and frequent informal and formal linkages between different levels of ecosystem players, as seen from sophisticated ecosystem mappings carried out in developed ecosystems by Endeavour, among others. These linkages were important to: 1) pool resources efficiently; 2) familiarize investors with the pipeline; 3) strengthen support services and address ecosystem gaps; 4) potentially facilitate matchmaking, B2B, or entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur linkages. However, as mapped out by the Climate Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Diagnostic (CEED) carried out in 2017, most of the ecosystem players in the climate entrepreneurship ecosystem had few formal or informal relationships, and there were currently few joint or collaborative programs and networking events across the ecosystem.

Although there was a growing service offering of early-stage funding available in Morocco for green ventures, notably through the Innov’Invest program supported by the World Bank, there was still a significant and acute funding gap at the early stage, which disproportionately affected cleantech entrepreneurs due to their novel business models, market uncertainties, often comparatively higher capital requirements, and longer growth trajectories.

The Cluster solaire, through the Morocco climate entrepreneurship project and together with the IFC, commenced working in April 2018 on one side of this equation, through better preparation of green ventures across the Moroccan entrepreneurship ecosystem to access funding through both investment readiness training and hands-on coaching, as well as ecosystem building and networking.