Entrepreneur
In 1995,
Miriem Bensalah embarked on a motorbike tour of several thousand kilometers
across Morocco. In a bend
around the Northern city of Alhoceima, she fell on the ground. Because of a large live wound, she had to be
treated in Nador. "Forty-eight
hours later I was back on the bike!", confides this woman whose will is not hindered. When she sets a goal for herself, she puts at
work all the resources, her own and those of other people, in order to reach
such a goal. A
committed vision, managerial skills and a natural sense of leadership are her
assets. Elected in
2012 as the first woman president of the Moroccan employers association (the General
Confederation of Enterprises of Morocco) and re-elected in 2015, the "boss
of bosses" is the epitome of performance and efficiency in the service of
the economic development of the country. But she knows that "it is a heavy burden to
be the first,
You must pass the torch! ". At a very early stage of her life, she wanted to
be a model and a responsible woman: "As a sibling of five children, I felt
a duty to be exemplary’. Daughter of Abdelkader Bensalah, the founder of the
Holmarcom conglomerate, she joined the family group in 1986 after obtaining a
double MBA in management and finance in Dallas. In 1993, after receiving her pilot’s license, she
took on a new challenge, the “Aïcha des Gazelles” Rally that she won as crew captain. One of her most painful memories is the death of
her father in 1993 ("we were closely bonded"), then her sister's
death one year later. This
businesswoman, wife and mother of three children, is also a woman of culture. In 2005, she organized the first edition of the Casablanca
Festival and in
2009, was appointed Commissioner of the Earth Day by His Majesty King Mohammed
VI, which was "the beginning of a real collective awareness about the
environment. Since
then, Moroccans have been invited to be actors of change. "