As part of its Gender strategy, EBRD was looking to launch a Women in Business (WIB) in Morocco including refinancing and technical assistance for local partner financial institutions (PFIs).

In order for the PFI’s future strategies regarding WIB to be in-line with actual realities in the market and its potential, EBRD has mandated a comprehensive market research study built around a nationally representative survey of >800 female and male entrepreneurs. CCX has been selected for its expertise in conducting such survey and building a segmentation that complements conventional socio-demographic and –economic criteria with a “psychographic” segmentation that reflects the respondent’s values, attitudes and behavioural tendencies.

In addition to advising bank strategies, this segmentation will also assist EBRD’s policy dialogue with local stakeholders – as it brings for the first time a reliable picture of the circumstances, priorities and needs of Morocco’s formal MSMEs, and in particular its female entrepreneurs.

CCX has drawn up the respective concept, has identified qualified local research support and concluded successfully the survey. Based on algorithmic analysis of the survey data, CCX was able to identify key features of the WIB market on the basis of gender & formality, as well as to identify 7 distinct client segments within the WIB market. This unprecedented level of detail helps point to the salient characteristics of WIB for a gender-intelligent finance offer, and allows banks to design strategies in-line with selected high-value target segments.

A comprehensive set of questions (face-to-face interviews with entrepreneurs took around 45 minutes, each) allowed to obtain a detailed understanding of the current level of financial and business “literacy”, their perspectives on financial priorities and financial service providers, and current as well as likely future patterns of requesting and using financial and non-financial services to help them develop their businesses more successfully.

CCX created various output formats (reports, presentations, briefings) and makes the full data set available.

The project was finished with a Strategy Planning Workshop with one bank, focus groups to validate in detail what the selected target segments may value in a dedicated WiB offer, and final reports to bank and EBRD.