Description of the project
The Women Entrepreneurship Report published by the Global entrepreneurship monitor for the years 2016/2017 shows that women face additional hurdles with respect to men and that these barriers restrain women’s success in entrepreneurial activities. Generally, women’s enterprises have lower growth expectations and higher rates of discontinuance than men in EU countries. Support for newly established businesses, mentoring, education and training are important tools to sustain women entrepreneurial activities; especially entrepreneurial education has become an important priority for the EU since it creates new companies and jobs, opens up new markets, improves productivity and creates wealth.
WECAN addresses entrepreneurship as a key competence to both start up a business and create value as described by the EntreComp framework. The project aims at enhancing women’s positive perceptions of their skills to start a new business through a coaching journey in which coaches with relevant entrepreneurial experience will explain what it actually takes to be an entrepreneur.
WECAN aims at strengthening women’s entrepreneurial capacity and empowering the would-be entrepreneurs, or those with a newly established business, with a tailored coaching programme.
The specific objectives of the project are to:
- Develop basic and transversal entrepreneurial skills, using a tailored coaching programme
- Increase the sense of initiative and entrepreneurial mindset among female adults would-be or young entrepreneurs.
- Promote unconventional and informal learning to build self-confidence, brake barriers and empower female adults out of employment.
- Develop a coaching programme that enhances both coaches and mentees, developing new and creative tools that will improve the learning experience of the mentee and the coaching skills of experienced female entrepreneurs.
- An open European education and training area thanks to the use of innovative ICT, open educational resources (OER) within the e-platform that will be freely available.
Activities
- Development of a methodology in order to provide a theoretical approach for peer coaching between experienced women entrepreneurs and women who would like to be entrepreneurs.
- Creation of a training programme.
- Piloting of the training program with 18 women from all the partner countries. Piloting participants will be coach of women who need support on the first steps to be entrepreneurs.
Results
- WECAN methodological guide for coaching adult women in sense of initiative and entrepreneurship: this guide, aimed at expert coaches and/or experienced entrepreneurs women willing to become coaches in the entrepreneurial field, introduces the project methodology capable of accompanying aspiring entrepreneurs on a path of transformation into professionals aware of their own potential.
- WECAN Curriculum Programme with Innovative training materials: The contents include entrepreneur skills, business, gender skills, social innovation companies.
- WECAN e-Learning Pack and e-learning platform offering to the wider community access to follow the course, experience the curriculim and get all the knowledge developed within the project.
Partners
- Eurocircle association, Francia (Coordinator)
- Center for Knowledge Management, North Macedonia
- Greek Association of Women Entrepreneurs, Greece
- I BOX CREATE, Spain
- Centro per lo Sviluppo Creativo Danilo Dolci, Italy
- CSI Center for Social Innovation, Cyprus
