The Improving the Business Climate in Morocco (IBCM) Program in Morocco is supporting the government to be more responsive to the needs of business, so that business may more effectively contribute to Morocco’s goals of expanded economic growth and job creation.  The program will help to improve the overall business climate, facilitate access to finance for small business, and help Morocco meet its commitments under the recently negotiated Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  DevTech will assess gender constraints and integrate 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 will:

• Provide review and inputs to project work plan development to ensure gender integration

• Assess gender-based constraints to the expansion of financial markets

• Catalogue available resources including women’s business associations and women’s lawyer’s association and establish contacts with these stakeholders in the business sector

• Provide input into the drafting, review and monitoring of policy, laws and regulations to ensure that gender considerations are factored into them

• Review training plans to ensure that those training workshops delivered under the project incorporate issues of particular importance to business women

• Integrate 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

• Provide gender integration training to IBCM staff in Morocco