Provinding young women from rural backgrounds, particularly NEETs, in Spain, Italy and Lithuania, with tools, training and support to become successful entrepreneurs and improve their employability.
Context
Gender equality in rural entrepreneurship remains a challenge as women continue to face economic inequalities and barriers to accessing business opportunities. In Italy, women-led businesses are still a minority, especially in regions such as Sicily, where female entrepreneurship is even less widespread. Limited access to resources reduces the chances of growth and success of their businesses. The same applies to Spain and Lithuania, where women’s businesses are mostly small and have great difficulty expanding. Despite the presence of a large rural population, opportunities for women to develop sustainable businesses remain limited.
Objectives
- Provide young women from rural backgrounds with entrepreneurship tools to be able to open their own businesses that generate wealth in the area.
- Create a community of women based on sisterhood and a space where they do not feel judged.
- Foster dialogue among actors in the entrepreneurial and employment landscape, keep participants updated on current initiatives that can help them in their employability and entrepreneurship projects, and to promote meaningful exchanges between institutions.
Activities
- Training course for facilitators who will support young participants in the various stages of the project, learning methodologies of co-creation, peer2peer, coaching, technical skills on entrepreneurship.
- Training course (up to 80 hours) for young women on entrepreneurship, including study-visits to real projects and best practices in rural areas.
- Co-housing experience in which participants will live together, share space and tasks, work on their personal project, and receive at least 10 hours of training on the topic of entrepreneurship.
- Transnational bootcamp with focus on networking and experience sharing among participants and facilitators from the 3 countries.
- Give-back activities and 40 hours of training where participants will propose initiatives to create added value (e.g.: volunteer actions, workshops in schools, events…).
- 4 dissemination events.
Resources
- Training course for facilitators;
- Training course for young women;
- Final training;
- Best practices report;
- Co-housing phase report.
Impact
- At least 100 young women from rural backgrounds trained in entrepreneurship.
- 8 facilitators and youth workers trained in supporting young women in their entrepreneurial projects.
- 45 transnational bootcamp participants.
- At least 10 partnerships reached at the local level.
Partner
- Fundación Escuela de Organización Industrial FSP (Spain, coordinator)
- CESIE ETS (Italy)
- Cámara Oficial de Comercio, Industria, Servizos e Navigación de Santiago de Compostela (Spain)
- Europos socialinis verslumo ir inovatyvių studijų institutas (Lithuania)
