The project was designed to promote the constitution of an online epistemic community of female entrepreneurs that provided training to other female entrepreneurs with micro businesses in the areas of business management, digital marketing and sales, social and ecological responsibility and collaborative work among peers. For this purpose, the project adopted a bottom-up participatory approach to training by recruiting experts within the community. We wanted to achieve, and did achieve, the following objectives: ● Improve the business management competences and soft-skills of female entrepreneurs that received training from their more experienced peers, so that they will be better able to implement sustainable businesses. ● Produce useful resources for peer training in female entrepreneurship that are available to the public, online and in open access, in Portuguese, English and German. ● Hold an online Boot Camp with intensive online discussion of the contents being produced, which were presented by the experts to their peers with the moderation of the consortium. ● Hold a final dissemination Conference and Business Fair that included training sessions, lectures and networking sessions.
The XTeam-FEM project resulted from the need to empower female entrepreneurs with micro businesses, through the dissemination of peer learning within them. We felt the need to apply for this project because in the community Mulheres à Obra (Women at Work), that today surpasses 170 000 members, it is quite obvious that many of these women struggle with the lack of access to learning opportunities, both in business management as in more general soft skills. The training programs and courses available in the market are often not affordable, considering their financial constraints, and the experts that provide these contents are usually not prepared to deal with a public with limited digital and business management skills that requires more time in the early stages of the learning process. Due to this necessity, the community Women at Work had, for some time, been providing learning opportunities through an informal peer learning initiative, the Academia MAO, but we wanted to do more, in a more consistent way, and the XTeam-FEM project was designed with this purpose.