Morocco along with Tunisia and Egypt are emerging as new global hubs for social entrepreneurship in light of the growth in start-ups in fields as various as banking, health, lending, currencies and e-commerce, writes Start Up Smart, an Australian news portal. Egypt, for its part, broke records with the creation of thousands of start-ups in 2012 and 2013, says the Australian start-up website. The same source explains that the growth of start-ups in the three north African countries was boosted by efforts to attract foreign investors, several generic accelerator programs have popped up, such as Flat6labs in Tunisia, and Innov Invest and Numa in Morocco. On the impact of these start-ups on job creation, the website notes that a great number of these start-uppers are creating transport and health projects with the aim of compensating for insufficient government investment. The portal gives an example of the Moroccan start-up Safa, which was created by students, at the Mohammadia engineering school, and developed a clay-and-wood water filter employing housewives to build the filters in return for a share of profits.

Source: The North Africa Journal March 17, 2017 12:22 UTC