How The Anou Empowers Moroccan Artisan Entrepreneurs

“You do not arrive in Figuig by mistake,” said Jessica Counsell, an American Peace Corps Volunteer who had been living there for two years.

Jessica and her husband, Tom Counsell, were helping Moroccan artists sell their wares directly to North American buyers.

Their involvement began when Dan Driscoll, a former Peace Corps Volunteer, founded The Anou. Like most entrepreneurs, Driscoll's venture began with the desire to solve a frustrating problem. He was tired of the persistent poverty in Figuig and the Ait Bouguemez Valley of Morocco. It also frustrated him that "middlemen keep on average 96% of the final selling price of products on the artisan market."

Although authors only capture 10% of physical book's retail price and other creatives live with similar economics, Driscoll wanted to help Moroccan artisans to capture a bigger slice of the pie.

After helping Moroccans sell their handicrafts directly to the customer on eBay and Etsy, he knew there was a market for artisans to sell directly to the customer.

Tom Counsell devised an interface that would allow the artists to upload data about their products even if they are illiterate. They've kept improving the interface. Driscoll says, "Artisans now get QR codes for every new order. They scan the QR code and the app updates the customers on how their orders are progressing."

The QR codes also help logistics. They now have more shipping options. For example, in May 2018, Anou sent its first container to a distribution center in the US. From there, individual orders were shipped to customers. Driscoll said, "This dropped shipping costs by as much as 75% off of what used to be our cheapest shipping option."

Other companies claim to help customers buy directly from African artisans. How does Anou differentiate itself?

Driscoll says, "Our key differentiator is that Anou is managed by artisans, for artisans. If you look closely at most other companies in our space, they have replaced one middleman with another. I am the only person in Anou who is not an artisan and who is not a Moroccan. And I'm working hard to make myself obsolete."

Unfairness in Fairtrade

When consumers see the Fairtrade label, they assume everything is dandy. Driscoll says that it can miss corruption that is embedded in the cooperatives that you'd think would protect the artisans. He said, "With Fairtrade, artisans now get 20% of the final selling price instead of the 4% they used to get. That's a five-fold improvement, which is great. But we'd like to improve that."

One strategy is to train the artisans to do what the middlemen do:

• Take good photographs of the products
• Marketing and promotion
• Order fulfillment

The second strategy is to block those who try to skim some of the profits. Driscoll said, "Anou has systems that automate accounting for artisans across the Anou community to facilitate group cohesion and reduce corruption with co-ops, which fairtrade overlooks."

When Driscoll discovered that most of Morocco's materials were dyed using formaldehyde, they built Atlas Wool Supply, a full in-house dye operation fully staffed by artisans from the Anou community. Their vision is to make it Morocco’s only source for quality craft materials. Now the eyes of the artisans no longer get swollen when they work.

Driscoll says that with one day of training, an artisan with a 5th-grade education can do dye work at a better consistency than the largest dye factories in Casablanca. He says, "We now do dye work for large companies to take advantage of economies of scale. That, in turn, makes the raw material more affordable to artisans."

By the end of 2018, Anou plans to increase its vertical integration by opening a wool mill. That will mean that they will need to work with sheepherders.

Driscoll hopes that the mill will ensure consistent raw material for artisans. As they capture more of the supply chain, they plan to leverage the lessons from the language-free applications they built so that artisans can manage whole business. This may also keep them busy when the rugs aren't flying off the shelves.

With such end-to-end capabilities, Anou hopes to sell their logistic services, dye work, and materials to third-parties and that the profit from those operations will help fund further growth.

The Figuig artists weren’t the only entrepreneurs in town. For The Unseen Africa Show's pilot episode, we filmed and interviewed female entrepreneurs who make couscous via a cooperative.

They indicated that there’s a tug of war going on between the men who want their women to stay home and those who support their efforts to make and sell couscous. It seems like the women are winning, albeit slowly.

Driscoll reflected on his unexpected entrepreneurial journey, "We started Anou to simply connect artisans to customers worldwide, but we kept peeling back layers that demonstrated how entrenched and accepted a lot of practices were that exploited artisans. This ranges from middlemen to fairtrade organizations. Market access ultimately was just one of many issues, and not even the largest one. This partly explains why every year someone starts some new platform, they say it's groundbreaking, but nothing changes and they fade away because none of them recognized the core issues that continually keep artisans poor. The only way forward is to figure out how artisans, actual artisans, can reinvent the artisan economy and build it from the ground up so the economy works for them, rather than against them."

Perched on the edge of Sahara, Figuig is a palm-filled paradise. Most of the homes and city walls were made of mud. Once a year, locals slap mud on their walls to keep the city from falling apart. The peacefulness of Figuig is intoxicating. Tourists may never know the innovation that's going on in its narrow alleyways.