The numbers,
and what sits
outside them.

Reading the data honestly

A falling participation rate alongside rising visibility.

The two trends are not contradictory, and holding both in view at once is essential to understanding the region accurately.

Over the past two decades, the number of highly visible women leading major businesses across North Africa and the Middle East has grown substantially — enough to sustain annual rankings such as Forbes Middle East’s list of the 100 Most Powerful Businesswomen, on which Salwa Idrissi Akhannouch was ranked 23rd in 2025. Over the same period, Morocco’s female labour-force participation fell from 28 per cent to 19 per cent.

Visibility at the top and participation at the base are governed by different mechanisms. Senior business leadership responds to capital access, family enterprise structures, education at the elite level and international market openness. Broad participation responds to childcare, transport, rural employment structures, informal-sector conditions, social norms around work and the availability of formal jobs at entry level. Progress in the first does not automatically produce progress in the second, and treating one as evidence of the other produces a badly distorted picture.

Why the distinction matters here

It matters because it identifies which parts of this career are genuinely relevant to the wider question, and which are not. A group of AKSAL’s scale being founded and led by a woman is significant as a demonstration — it establishes that the ceiling is not where it is often assumed to be. But demonstrations do not, by themselves, move a national participation rate.

What can move it is the creation of large numbers of accessible, formal, progressable jobs. Retail is one of the few sectors that produces exactly that: entry-level roles with low formal-qualification barriers, concentrated in urban centres reachable by public transport, in workplaces where women’s employment is already socially normalised, and — critically — with a visible ladder from shop floor to supervision to store and centre management.

That is the sense in which AKSAL Academy, founded in 2011, is the more consequential fact. A training institution offering programmes in retail, services and mall management converts a category of casual work into a career with recognised competencies. Institutional capacity of that kind tends to change participation figures more reliably than advocacy or example.