Women represent 16.2% of business leaders (active natural persons, active legal persons, and self-entrepreneurs) in Morocco, according to the Moroccan Observatory of Very Small, Small and Medium Enterprises (OMTPME) in a press release which reports the first results of its study on women entrepreneurs and business leaders in Morocco.
In detail, 14.6% of active legal person companies are run by women, 16.3% of active natural person companies belong to women and 25.5% of active self-entrepreneurs are women. The study was carried out on the basis of exhaustive data, which makes it a first in Morocco, specifies the press release, explaining that the database used includes 567,041 companies, legal entities, and active natural persons, in addition to 49,160 auto-active entrepreneurs.
In order to overcome the obstacle of non-availability of data on gender, the Observatory based itself on the first names of managers and entrepreneurs entered in the databases received from partners, namely the Moroccan Office of Industrial Property and commercial and the Directorate General of Taxes.
The complete study of the Observatory on female entrepreneurship and women leaders in Morocco will be published soon, with more indicators, in particular the distribution of women entrepreneurs by sector of activity, by the size of the company, by legal form and region, as well as the share of employment in enterprises run by women.
According to the World Bank, the share of women leaders and entrepreneurs in Morocco was 16.1% in 2019, a rate lower than the global average, at 43.2%, and the average for sub-Saharan Africa, at 56%. , noting however that these figures are based on surveys conducted on a limited sample and probably include the informal sector.
