Although largely beneficial, migration can have many constraints. I.e. restrictive social norms or laws, gender or racial discrimination, or gender‐specific vulnerabilities. Such things limit the opportunities and benefits of migrants. When women migrate, it can improve their self-efficacy, human capital, and autonomy, as well as their authority and worth in their families and communities. Traditional norms can be adjusted by providing women with access to education and economic opportunities and the introduction of more equitable social norms, which can improve women’s rights and access to resources. According to UNHCR Review of Gender Equality in Operations, 2016, concludes that despite the existing efforts targeting women and girls in these contexts, the need to invest in their protection and empowerment is still extremely high. According to the report, women face extra layers of barriers to find sustainable income-generating activities. So, despite the potential for improving their lives there are many disadvantages and risks that women face as compared to men. Although these efforts are praiseworthy, we still see the recurring problem of women in migrant communities in situations of vulnerability, and a "vicious cycle" of cultural/racial stereotypes reinforcement, resulting in a perpetual cycle of poverty.. and poverty for women has close links to vulnerability and falling victim to economical violence, which is a major contributor to democratic inequalities. The UPSIM consortium consists of partners from Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Czech Republic, and France (Guadeloupe). The trans-sectoral nature of the consortium, i.e. Municipality, NGO, private organisations specialised in language acquisition, pedagogy and didactics, and active in the field of migrant integration; provides the project with a multifaceted perspective on shared issues. Project management will be led by IKF and will run throughout the project to monitor / ensure that the project is on track, achieves the aims and objectives, and delivers the planned outputs. The consortium will also have a designated quality assurance board, to ensure the quality of deliverables are up to par. The UPSIM project proposes to develop resources that provide migrant/minority women, residing in the EU, with a suite of tools that enable them to study non-formal competence (learning to learn) and the language skills required to reach educational goals. This will be achieved by the development of a concept framework, locating the main points of interest and providing insight into the situations of women in the partner countries. This knowledge will be unfolded through the development of a rapid language acquisition and learning to learn tool, which will be used directly by migrant women. The project has a dual focus on providing the main target group with necessary support. So, on one side, we have resources that can be used directly by the Target Group, but we will also work with the people around them, to support our target group in the transition phases. For this reason, we will develop a successful integration manual, which provides social workers, volunteers, mentors, and others working with our target group with the skills and tools that enable them to support women in reaching educational goals and working with creating supportive networks. All resources will be presented via an online learning platform, where access to acquisition of knowledge will be available to all, through multimodal audio-visual learning scenarios, and in-service training courses for the creation of mentoring circles. During the project funded period, we will hold 4 transnational meetings, a joint learning event, and multiplier events. The materials will be developed in international teams who will test content through testing workshops, and feedback sessions and adapt the final results based on feedback from target groups. Working in transnational and trans-sectoral groups ensures that a problem is seen from more than one view point. The non-homogenous composition of our consortium ensures that we see topics from different perspectives; i.e. across cultures, sectors, and professional areas of expertise. The results and impact of the project outputs are inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 8, which refer to the wellbeing of female migrants and refugees. We envisage an impact showing more women gaining the language and learning-to-learn skills that will enable them to embark on their journeys along existing Upskilling Pathways; and the people working with this target group will gain the attitudes, skills, and competences necessary to support minority migrant women in making real life changes, contribute to democratic equality for minority women, and remove barriers that are caused by situations of vulnerability.
To upgrade the competences of the professionals who work directly with these vulnerable groups of women, we designed career development training workshops. The foundations for the training rests on a foundation of best practice and evidence based content and methodologies.This professional development resource are guiding professionals working with our primary target group, gaining new knowledge about how to strengthen the individuals' self-belief system, how to build a support group network, how to mentor and guide through change processes via mentoring circles and positive psychology, and how to guide them through the language learning/learning to learn process. The final result is a Multimodal Learning Scenarios, of the project learning platform, which was designed to promote self-learning and present the tools, resources, and all project results. There are two areas of the platform. One for professionals and one for learners. This platform development consists of visual, audio, and text based presentation and support material for the learning resources provided in outputs 2 and 3.
The main reason we applied for this project was to provide tools and a platform for professional working with migrant women to deepen the process of acquiring new skills, focused on the language acquisition in the arriving countries. The needs addressed here were defined by EU education ministers in 2015 – to, among other things, implement intensive language learning to help overcome social inequalities, especially to increase access to education for marginalised groups. To further support our aims, the importance of literacy, numeracy and language learning, at different proficiency levels, for resettlement and integration of refugees and migrants is supported by research evidence (e.g. ACTA, 2017; Benseman, 2012; OECD/EC,2015; OECD, 2018).