Coming to Gitex Africa? Here Is How We Think About Morocco After Operating Here.
Gitex Africa lands in Marrakech this week. If you are attending — as a founder, an investor, or someone genuinely weighing Morocco as a next move — you will leave with contacts, energy, and probably a clearer sense of the opportunity.
What takes longer to develop is a feel for how the market actually works once you are inside it. Not because the information is hidden, but because it is the kind of thing you absorb through experience rather than research. As internationals who made the move and built here, this is how we think about it.
Relationships come before process.
In most markets relationships are an advantage. Here they are closer to a prerequisite. Things move — contracts, introductions, administrative files, supplier priorities — through people who know and trust each other. The mechanisms exist, but the relationships are what activate them.
This does not mean you cannot move quickly. It means the time you invest in being present and genuinely interested in people pays back in ways that are hard to quantify but very easy to feel when it matters.
The language situation is more layered than it looks.
French runs the professional surface. Arabic runs the administration. Darija — the spoken Moroccan dialect — runs everything else. It is not written, not standardised, and not bridged by any translation tool that currently exists. Your staff, your suppliers, your customers: they will move between all three depending on context and comfort.
Building here means getting comfortable with that layering rather than trying to flatten it. The companies that struggle are often the ones that assumed French was enough.
Cash-on-delivery is not a gap in the market. It is the market.
If you are coming from a market where card payments and instant checkout are the default, the persistence of COD in Moroccan e-commerce will seem like an anomaly. It is not. It reflects a specific and rational consumer logic — one built on low historical card penetration, reasonable scepticism about online transactions, and a preference for paying once goods are in hand.
Understanding that logic changes how you build, price, and think about customer behaviour here. It is one of the most useful reframes for anyone entering the consumer space.
Administrative timelines are a fixed cost, not a variable.
Registration, banking, permits, tax setup: the processes are real and they work, but they run on a timeline that is genuinely different from what most international founders expect. Treating it as a contingency — something to sort out once momentum builds — tends to create friction at exactly the wrong moment.
The adjustment is simple: build it in from the start, work with people who know the sequence, and do not let the setup timeline set the pace for everything else.
Morocco makes sense when you take it on its own terms.
None of this is a reason to hesitate. The fundamentals are strong — a growing middle class, improving infrastructure, genuine strategic position between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa, and a business environment that rewards people who show up and stay. The founders doing well here are the ones who were curious enough to learn how things actually work before assuming they already knew.
What are you taking for granted that you want to test while you are here? We are at Gitex this week and happy to compare notes.
Calina, Sorato Digital — sorato.io
