The project focuses on the social inclusion of women wishing to develop their own business in the area of trade and logistics through integration into entrepreneurship in the underdeveloped regions of Bulgaria - the North Central and Northwestern region through training, acquiring practical skills and competencies in order to generate financial, cultural and social value. The project partners have realized, there is a growing need for creative and innovative training approaches in entrepreneurship in order to overcome the previous weaknesses. In that context the main objectives of our project are: 1. To implement a comparative analysis on the women entrepreneurship skills demand and supply on the labor market in the 3 country partners - Bulgaria, UK and Italy. The project focuses on the social inclusion of women wishing to develop their own business in the area of trade and logistics through integration into entrepreneurship in the underdeveloped regions. 2. To elaborate the Key Areas and Features for developing the women entrepreneurship skills based on the comparative analysis. 3. To expand the knowledge, skills and competencies in women entrepreneurship on the territories of the countries of the partners to identify which of them could be transform into the practice of the trade SMEs and how they could strengthen the competitiveness of the sector. 4. To create women Entrepreneurial Self-Development Tool in an innovative manner and to provide the methodological guidelines and tools for trade entrepreneurship skills development. 5. The project results would be validated and tested in 1 pilot training - joint training event aims enhancing the access, participation and learning performance of disadvantaged learners, reducing disparities in learning outcomes. 6. To create an innovative platform for exchanging experience and good practices for women entrepreneurship skills development support which will ease the the access to and engagement with digital technologies in formal and non-formal education of disadvantaged learners. 7. To disseminate effectively and provide open access to the project results. So the development of women entrepreneurship skills will ensure employment and economic growth in the regions of the partner organizations. According to the objectives the results of the project will be as follows: 1. The project completion will help reducing the social inclusion by enhancing the access, participation and learning performance of disadvantaged learners, by supporting and assessing new approaches to reducing disparities in access to and engagement with digital technologies in formal and non-formal education. 2. Updating and developing digital learning materials and tools in trade entrepreneurship. 3. Support employability and the learning and labour mobility between different jobs in the partner countries. 4. Improve and extend the supply of high quality learning opportunities which are tailored to the needs of individual low-skilled or low-qualified adults in the regions in order to provide them employment opportunities by enhancing their digital competences and entrepreneurship competences and stimulate them towards higher qualifications. 60 low-skilled students will be selected to participate in the training in UK and will be involved in the project among the target groups in Bulgaria and Italy. The students participating in the training will be selected according to their personal motivation. They will be attracted in the project by the improved overall employment and well-being which it provides. Their involvement is described in the respective sections of the form. They will be in risk of social inclusion because they are low-skilled or low-qualified adults who are unemployed, facing disadvantages of any kind: Social obstacles; Economic obstacles; Disability; Health problems: Geographical obstacles: Cultural differences: They will be selected on the principles of shared values, equality, including non-discrimination and risk of social inclusion. They will participate in the Joint Training and into the research process. The intellectual outputs of the project will be available for public free use on the website of the project. The impacts of our project are going to be: 1. The target groups will acquire new competencies and benefit by the enriched training provision into women entrepreneurship. 2. The target groups will drive economic growth by innovations and creativity. 3. Improved overall employment and well-bring for the target groups and for the local communities. 4. Intellectual outputs with open access. The integrated impact of the project will be enhanced competitiveness and economic growth for the companies in the trade and logistic sector, enlarged employment possibilities for low-skilled adults because of the adequate innovative and ongoing training.
The project focuses on the social inclusion of women wishing to develop their own business in trade and logistics through integration into entrepreneurship in the three partner countries (Bulgaria, Italy and the UK) through training for acquiring practical skills and competencies to generate financial, cultural and social value. The project partners have realized that there is a growing need for creative and innovative training approaches in women entrepreneurship to overcome the previous weaknesses. The main objectives of the project are achieved via the implementation of three intellectual outputs: 1. Intellectual Output 2: Development of innovative training solutions on the women entrepreneurship and digital competences required for the trade and logistics development This Output consisted of the creation of Women Entrepreneurship Self-Development Tools which are one of the main project intellectual outputs which were used for exploitation and mainstreaming. The developed training solutions were used by the wide audience for better match to labor market trade entrepreneurship demand. Innovative training solutions were designed which brought practical entrepreneurship trade skills for women into the training content; - were very practical, with up-to-date training content and easily transferable from the training room to the day-to-day world of work in trade and logistics; - were based on the new paradigm of doing global business and prevailing electronic communication; - covered also "soft skills" and "attitudes" as part of the whole management and operational competence. 2. Intellectual Output 3: The work on Intellectual Output 3 - Platform for Knowledge Sharing and Good Practices Exchange and a Forum for Ideas Exchange - can be divided into several stages: • First stage: Development of a project website • Second stage: Platform development • Third stage: Placement of educational electronic content in the platform. In summary, the following results can be indicated as achieved: - developed website of the project - developed forum for exchange of ideas - developed e-learning training platform - over 120 explained keywords and concepts - over 1.5 hours of recorded video lessons - over 300 pages of digitized presentations - over 150 test questions - over 25 pages of developed assignments - over 200 pages of electronic content in pdf format. 3. Intellectual Output 4: Once the work on the E-learning training platform was completed, it was ready for testing by the students and he participants from the three partner countries. It was decided that the platform would be tested by a minimum of 150 people, 50 from each country. At the same time, a questionnaire was developed and approved by the partners to assess the satisfaction with the testing of the e-learning content introduced in the platform. The Bulgarian partner and coordinator had to test the system on site in a controlled learning environment. The testing was attended by over 80 students majoring in "Economics of the Trade" from the Academy of Economics "D. A. Tsenov ”, over 60 participants from the United Kingdom and over 30 students from Italy. As a result, between 159 and 180 tests were performed in the system of all 9 modules. Below we present summary statistics on the online work of the experts and participants. There can be highlighted the following more important aspects: Significant attention from those wishing to be tested is paid to the Introduction and Methods of teaching and learning - 1473 views; - Topics have been read over 3358 times. - The video lessons and the presentation have been viewed over 2900 times. - The introduced tests have been reviewed over 9000 times which shows a strong desire to achieve higher results than the tested. - The certificate has been viewed over 200 times. - Over 160 questionnaires have been processed and summarized. On the base of the results of Intellectual Output 2, a joint training seminar took place in London, the UK. All participants in the training seminar were selected through a rigorous selection procedure and criteria approved by the three partner organizations. The working language of the training was English. During the training seminar, the participants were introduced to the main features of entrepreneurship, in particular women's entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial process, the requirements for structuring a business plan, the possibilities for financing a business, etc. In addition to getting acquainted with the theoretical background in the field of entrepreneurship, the participants developed a business plan on a predefined topic. At the end of the project final virtual conference was organized with the participation of 150 local stakeholders and 50 foreigner participants. During the conference the results of the project were discussed and were outlined plans for future cooperation between the project partners.