From May 10-12, 2017, CLDP held a regional program with participants from Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Morocco in Casablanca, Morocco to share best practices in promoting SME development.  The program included participants from the private sector, including consultants, incubators and accelerator programs, and government actors whose aim is to promote entrepreneurship.

Topics for the program included best practices in building innovation ecosystems, facilitating effective and efficient business registration procedures, promoting technology transfer at universities and research centers to create companies and jobs, and developing effective government assistance programs to small businesses. Legal frameworks that make business registration accessible, transparent, and efficient through the lens of the World Bank Doing Business indicators were also discussed by panelists and experts.

Through a regional approach with countries from the Gulf, North Africa and the Caucuses, the program benefited from participants sharing best practices and experiences in their own countries. U.S. experts from Stanford University, the Department of Commerce's Small Business Administration and Office of the General Counsel, and a private consulting practice shared U.S. best practices and various models for promoting small business creation and development, technology commercialization, and the developmen tof innovation ecosystems. This program was funded by the U.S. Department of State, including funding from its Middle East Partnership Initiative.