Project duration: 1.4.2020. – 31.12.2021.
Project reference: 2019-3-UK01-KA205-077785
Grant amount: 204.569,00 €
Donor: Erasmus+ UK National Agency
Summary:
Lately, we are witnessing high unemployment rates, especially for young people who have difficulties in even getting their first jobs and gathering relevant experience for their (future) careers. Self-employment and entrepreneurship has turned out to be a valuable option for careers’ building. However, with the development of the IT sector, classic “offline” enterprises do not bring enough clients and profit and, thus, do not survive for long time. We believe that youth self-employment in digital entrepreneurship can reduce youth unemployment. In order to get into digital entrepreneurship, all interested youngsters / individuals need to have respective high(er) level of ICT / digital competences.
As most of our unemployed youngsters admit in our short survey that they lack digital business competences, with this project we are contributing to the development of their ICT/digital competences, or in other words – of the relevant and high-quality skills and competences for digital entrepreneurship of theirs. With this project, thus, we are answering to the needs defined by institutions, as well as the needs of our own youth workers and youngsters. We are promoting digital entrepreneurship of youngsters and are producing intellectual outputs that will serve as a quality knowledge management material for education of current and future youth workers for efficient and effective empowerment and mentoring of youngsters for digital entrepreneurship.
Project objectives:
– Empower unemployed youngsters for digital entrepreneurship start-up through development of inspiring, innovative and up-to-date handbook, as well as the online course.
– Empower our youth workers and improve knowledge management of youth work organisations in theory and practice for building competences of youth workers in digital entrepreneurship for youngsters, through LTTA and innovative curriculum for youth workers’ training and useful toolkit with workshops for youngsters.
– Exchange good practices and further develop quality strategic partnership among partners from 5 European countries with different realities in regards to youth employment and digital entrepreneurship
We expect following direct participants / beneficiaries of our project:
– 10 staff / project managers and assistants;
– 18 teachers/trainers/researchers, technicians and youth workers working on the intellectual outputs;
– 25 multipliers youth workers that will test the outputs with at least 100 youngsters on local level
– 250 participants of the multiplier events;
Project activities:
- A1 – Project Management
- M1 – Kick-off meeting
- O1 – Handbook “Digital Entrepreneurship Start-up”
- M2 – Second meeting
- O2 – Curriculum “Empowering youth workers to encourage digital entrepreneurship start-ups among youngsters”
- M3 – Third meeting
- O3 – Toolkit “Mentoring and supporting youngsters for digital entrepreneurship start-up”
- M4 – Fourth meeting
- O4 – E-learning course “Digital Entrepreneurship Start-up course for youngsters”
- C1 – LTTA “Training of trainers for digital entrepreneurship start-up for youth”
- E1, E2, E3, E4, E5 – Open conferences in RS, HR, SE, DE, UK
- M5 – Evaluation meeting
The project will directly impact organisational capacities to work on providing digital entrepreneurship education to youngsters with fewer opportunities – mainly unemployed and NEET ones, as well as those coming from rural, more traditional, economically depraved or other disadvantaged backgrounds. The youth organisations involved and represented by their youth workers in the project will improve their practices, support systems and knowledge management when it comes to current and future empowerment of their new coming youth workers for empowering youngsters for digital entrepreneurship start-up. With all our intellectual outputs, we will influence the change and improvement of existing (digital) entrepreneurship youth work / NFE methodologies and programmes, at first among partner organisations of the project, and later among partner of ours and their wider network of collaborators. Unemployed youngsters will benefit from the enlarged support tools and mechanisms in their communities for youth digital entrepreneurship start-up. There will be more quality opportunities (through enlarged youth work activities) for unemployed youngsters to develop their competences of innovation and creativity in/for digital entrepreneurship. Thus, more youngsters in communities (also the ones that had not have the privilege to attend the formal education school for ICT / digital competences) will have a chance to improve the competences and practice in using ICT tools for business development. This will further influence those youngsters in the way that they will have more chances for gathering experience for and building their planned career by doing something they desire for their work.