A business school in Marrakech

A place that offers ideal conditions in which to study. A campus blessed with brand new sports facilities, and a competent teaching staff, in an establishment providing degrees recognised in both Morocco and France. The campus opened in Marrakech by the Marseilles based Euromed Management school is bound to make any European student green with envy. The establishment’s first ever academic year got underway last month, with an intake of sixty students, 58 of them Moroccan. Delighted to be there, they all gained their place by passing entrance exams held concurrently in Marrakech and Euromed’s French campus.
Amongst the new intake, Kamel Berrada, 18, from Casablanca, who is taking the generalist business course. Like many other students, he would eventually like to sit the Universa entrance exam run by a consortium of 7 prestigious French management schools – all of them grandes écoles – aimed at foreign graduates. Kamel, who lives on campus, says that “for a Moroccan, it’s perfect.” His colleague, Saad Belmejdoub, 22, speaks of “an oasis in the desert.” For these young men from wealthy families, studying at Euromed Management Maroc costs 10,000 euros per year, including fees and accommodation.
A twenty minute drive from the city centre, the campus is part of the site belonging to the Private University of Marrakesh, currently 25 ha, but set to expand to cover 32 ha, work on which was begun in 2005. The site (30 million euros invested) is owned by the family of Marrakech born and bred Mohammed Kabbaj, a specialist in tertiary education since 1987. “Seven percent of Moroccan educationalists currently teach in the private sector. The country has set an objective of 20% by 2016,” he says. “With economic growth averaging 6% per annum, and a number of Euro-Mediterranean companies active in the local economy, we need to be able to deliver training that reflects international standards.” Mr Kabbaj met with the head of Euromed Management, Bernard Belletante, in Marseilles in July 2008. “I needed to find a top-ranking partner in the field of management, one of our campus’s 4 strat-egic areas of study, along with the hotel and catering industry, engineering and health.” A year later, the campus got the status of Moroccan Tertiary Education Establishment and the first students took up residency. The project’s partners, amongst whom is Franck Recoing, Vice-President of the Marseilles-Provence CCI and a member of the school’s Board of Trustees, insist that the speed at which things have progressed can be put down “exclusively to the project’s solid foundations.”
This first “public-private partnership signed within the framework of the Mediterranean Union”, as Mr Belletante says, is an expression of a broader, yet more ambitious project. The school is intent on increasing the number of students from North and West Africa to 1,200 by 2015. “We give Moroccan families the chance to provide their children with tertiary education without sending them abroad. That not only means less expenditure, but also less worry, particularly in terms of sending young women elsewhere to study,” says Jean-Jacques Michelin, Euromed Management Maroc’s  Assistant Director. West African families may also prefer to send their sons and daughters to a business school in the Maghreb rather than one in Europe or the United States.   
In terms of teaching, the school insists on the need for “around 30 permanent staff.” For 2009-2010, the turnover of Kabbaj’s site is set to increase to approximately 10 million euros, while the Euromed Management Maroc campus will have a turnover of 500,000 euros. The school intends to boost turnover to 10 million euros by 2015, taking on more teaching staff and expanding its continuous education business courses. “The main idea is to find ways of ensuring that Moroccan companies hire our graduates,” says Mr Michelin. “We are in touch with a number of major companies with subsidiaries over here. Axa, Crédit Agricole (via Crédit du Maroc), and Alcatel have all shown an interest.”