Over the past few years, women are becoming more and more active in various fields. In the world of business, although women are still not given equal opportunities as men, there is a great shift. Today women make up 40% of the world’s new entrepreneurs and more women keep turning to entrepreneurship every single day.

Women do not yet have equal opportunities in the field of businesses. This is why more and more women want to be their own bosses. They want to evolve their knowledge and expertise and build their own businesses. Businesses that will help them show off their true abilities and prove that women are equals to men when it comes to businesses and the labor market. The best way for them to do that is through entrepreneurship.

Our expertise in entrepreneurship has shown us that women in businesses and in important positions can only have a positive effect on the business. This is one of the reasons why businesses owned by women can be just as successful as businesses owned by men.

The Institute of Entrepreneurship Development, as a center of excellence in Entrepreneurship across Europe, has always been focusing on topics that involve women and entrepreneurship. Through our 14 years of experience in EU projects, we are familiar with the shifts in the labor market and how they can affect social topics. Therefore, most of our project will include women as a target group. Of course, we are particularly proud of our projects which focus solely on empowering women. Here are some of our strongest projects that empower women:

Urbagri4women

The project’s primary goal was to carry out activities that would help migrant women integrate welcoming communities and find their place in these societies. Also, it aimed to involve local and national bodies and entities, in order to create long-lasting relations of support and solidarity. Therefore, through the training, migrant women received new knowledge and competencies regarding agriculture, as well as potential entrepreneurial activity that can be pursued, and their usefulness in integrating local societies. These trainings were based on the training course that was developed by the URBAGRI4WOMEN partnership and included a wide range of topics, such as “Living in the EU”, “Introduction to Entrepreneurship”, “Introduction to agriculture activities”. The training is available in all the partner languages. Also, the Green Paper and the Manifesto were developed in the framework of the project to ensure that the project and its impact will live on after its completion

FEMME

FEMME project aimed to:

• Empower trainers/adult educators on mumpreneurship
• Empower mumpreneurs
• Map the state of the art of mumpreneurship in the partner countries
• Exchange best practices on mumpreneurship initiatives
• Disseminate mumpreneurship by establishing the basis for a European Network on Mumpreneurship;
• Ensure economical/social gender equality

Open Mind

Open Mind aimed at incubating social entrepreneurship and capacity for innovation with gamified open online content for students from all fields of study with a special focus on women. Such an inclusive and comprehensive gamified platform for learning social entrepreneurship was an innovation in all partner countries. It combined learning with social features and an online community for support and mentorship.

One of the key benefits of this project was that it targeted disadvantaged communities (women and young people, especially from non-business studies) that were to a large extent excluded from the entrepreneurship system. The gamified social entrepreneurship course is available for free in 5 languages and is tailored for the needs of students and female learners from a diverse background. The gamification provided a unique and memorable experiential learning environment, in which students will develop entrepreneurship knowledge and entrepreneurial skills and mindset at the same time.

E-STEAM

The objective of the E-STEAM project is to establish synergies among schools and the labor market towards a creative and meaningful engagement of girls in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering Art and Mathematics) education through a mentoring programme The programme focuses on:

• Developing a virtual platform as a resource hub for practical and innovative learning solutions complementing schools’ curricula

• Exploiting and disseminating personalized activities by promoting the use of that platform

These are just four of our strongest EU projects focusing on empowering women to become entrepreneurs, an active member in society and in general become more independent. IED always has and always will focus on taking part in projects that promote societal changes. Whether it is through helping vulnerable groups find their place in society or help develop innovative technologies, we will always use our excellence in entrepreneurship to promote actions and activities that will help us make a change!