In three years, Khadija Boutarbash’s life has been transformed. Once an economically vulnerable ambulant seller of handicrafts, she is now a proud entrepreneur who has expanded her family-run small enterprise into four retail outlets in Casablanca, having rented her first storefront with a microcredit loan of MAD25,000 ($3,000) in 2005. The lending agency provided training to help her diversify her offer and better identify and adapt to seasonal consumption patterns. Today she travels to rural areas near Marrakech, Taroudant, and Fes to restock her supply of paintings, teapots and knickknacks, relying on verbal agreements with mostly illiterate sellers, achieving daily sales of up to MAD1,000 ($120) per day. In Morocco, microfinance has quietly flourished in recent years, becoming something of a benchmark for the development of microfinance services throughout the MENA region. The country’s 13 microfinance institutions (MFIs) have so far loaned to over 1.7 million clients, at a 97%
