Green acceleration programme clicks with Morocco’s businesses
A project targeting young entrepreneurs with innovative ideas aimed at creating solutions to today’s environmental challenges has attracted the attention of start ups and entrepreneurs with 22 companies having embraced it so far.
The acceleration program, dubbed EMPACT, was launched by Enactus Morocco, in partnership with the OCP Entrepreneurship Network.
Hydrobarley and Amendy Foods are just two of the 22 socially conscious businesses launched by the program to encourage self-employment among students and boost job creation. Both of these businesses provide practical solutions to address environmental challenges in the agricultural sector.
Amendy Food, founded by three college graduates, focuses on the production, processing and marketing of agricultural products with a high nutritional value. This socially responsible business focuses specifically on the quinoa plant, seeing it as an opportunity to “address nutritional challenges and poverty in Morocco,” as well as a viable economic opportunity to generate considerable revenue.
” At Amendy, we are committed to working with small farmers in Chichawa area, where we are based, to help them live better through a sustainable agriculture that respects the people, animals and the environment, while allowing them to make considerable gains in terms of productivity and income,” Le Matin, Amendy’s co-founder, Manal Mhada said.
Hydrobarley, another environmentally and socially responsible business that sprang from the EMPACT program, has selected to focus on the production of animal feed. The company encourages farmers to diversify their agricultural activity through the production of so-called green feeds.
Hydrobarley makes use of hydroponics, which economizes 1500 times more water and 4,000 times the land for fodder crops and makes the fresh forage it produces accessible to farmers around the village of Moulay Driss Aghbal, 60 km from Rabat.
Hydrobarley’s CEO, Hanane Rifaii said: “This project has succeeded in changing the lives of farmers in this village by allowing them to develop new activities in their fields and have a new source of income to improve their living standards.”
