WINBIZ

Info

Title Women’s Innovative Business Incubation Zone

Acronym WINBIZ

Programme Erasmus+

Project Number 2021-1-PT01-KA220-ADU-000033741

Start – End Date 01/11/2021 – 31/10/2024

Duration 36 months

Action KA220-ADU – Cooperation partnerships in adult education

Funding Agency European Commission

Total Project Funding €390,433.00

Project Homepage n/a

Status Ongoing

Description

The WINBIZ project involves migrant women or women with a non-Western background, with medium-high levels of education, in a training pathway aimed at enabling the acquisition and development of personal, transversal and specific competencies and skills necessary for their full integration/ reintegration in the European labour market, thus generating well-being for themselves and for the society they live in.

The main objective of the project is to encourage the higher qualification of adult migrant women with a medium or high level of education through training and coaching, allowing them to acquire and develop personal, transversal, and entrepreneurial skills and abilities necessary for their inclusion in the labour market, promoting their empowerment and social integration, so that they can produce wealth for themselves and society. Through educational training, WINBIZ intends to promote women’s social self-entrepreneurship to generate systemic impact and contribute to the promotion of a sustainable, inclusive, and innovative civic economy model.

WINBIZ aims to:

contribute to the development of migrant women’s competencies in adult education through high-quality learning;
contribute to the promotion of open education and the development of methodological, didactic and technical innovations for the promotion of women’s social entrepreneurship. In the article “Integration of migrant women. A key challenge with limited policy resources”, published on the European Commission European Web Site On Integration (2018), based on the review of projects and best practices undertaken overall Europe, some points have been underlined as crucial for the achievement of the overall integration process of migrant women, through a comprehensive approach to access to employment which should take into consideration:
education and training
coaching and mentoring
labour market integration of migrant mothers
equipping migrant women with skills for women-dominated sectors
self-employment as an alternative

Project Outcomes

The main project outcomes will be:

A social and training needs research report, aiming at outlining the local, national, and European framework of opportunities and barriers that migrant women may face, about their educational and training condition for access to the labour market and their full social integration.
An online toolkit for trainers and tutors, created by integrating data and information from social research, technical and intellectual contributions from partners, already available OERs and input from potential trainers/tutors, who will be “tested” through alternative engagement and information gathering techniques, such as coaching circles. The methodology used will be based on the contributions of systemic methodologies such as Utheory and Design Thinking. The toolkit produced will then be used by the trained tutors themselves as an operational tool for coaching/mentoring activities for the benefit of migrant women involved in the MOOC.
A 150-hour-modular course to be structured in blended mode: 25 tutors will mentor 250 immigrant women during the course. The reference for the coaching/mentoring of the mentors will be the previously developed toolkit. The MOOC will be hosted within an e-learning platform and will aim to transfer knowledge to the target group and promote digital, entrepreneurial, intercultural and life skills. To validate the acquired skills, participants will receive a certificate and an open badge, according to the EntreComp framework.
A catalogue of business plans, bringing together the 15 best operational business plans developed by the women who have successfully followed the MOOC and who have obtained the highest score following participation in the final project work scheduled at the end of the MOOC. At the end of the blended course, there will be a 100-hour-project work (20 of which include the presence of the tutors), which will be structured as a team working experience that will lead the 250 participants, divided into groups, to the definition of business ideas. The project work will also be open to the participation and contribution of other women from the urban context in which the participants live. At the end of the project work, a special committee will evaluate the business ideas and select the 15 best—based on criteria of innovativeness and social impact—to be “incubated” in a transnational training campus, to transform the business ideas into real operational plans. The incubation phase will take place with the support and mentoring of 15 role models – namely the successful female migrant entrepreneurs from project partner countries. The results of WINBIZ have been designed to produce relevant outcomes in terms of direct and indirect impacts, as far as innovation is produced and the exchange of know-how between the involved organisations active in the education and training sector is promoted, and the social inclusion/empowerment of women and migrants is achieved.