Improving the Business Climate Program (IBCM)

The Improving the Business Climate in Morocco (IBCM) Program in Morocco supported the government to be more responsive to the needs of business, so that business could more effectively contribute to Morocco’s goals of expanded economic growth and job creation. The program helped to improve the overall business climate, facilitated access to finance for small business, and helped Morocco meet its commitments under the negotiated Free Trade Agreement with the United States. DevTech assessed gender constraints and integrated gender into the four components of the project: 1) Improved Policy, Legal and Regulatory Environment 2) More efficient and effective Judiciary 3) Improved Support Systems for Financial Markets Expansion 4) More growth-oriented Tax policies, laws, and regulations.

Specifically, DevTech:

• Provided review and inputs to project work plan development to ensure gender integration
• Assessed gender-based constraints to the expansion of financial markets
• Cataloged available resources including women’s business associations and women’s lawyer’s association and established contacts with these stakeholders in the business sector
• Provided input into the drafting, review and monitoring of policy, laws and regulations to ensure that gender considerations were factored into them
• Reviewed training plans to ensure that those training workshops delivered under the project incorporated issues of particular importance to business women
• Integrated gender into indicators and baseline data collection and analysis, where feasible and useful to monitor, through sex-disaggregated data, impact of project and/or particular interventions under the project on women and men
• Provided gender integration training to IBCM staff in Morocco