The overall objective of the GREENUP project was to boost the employability and entrepreneurship of young people living in rural areas of the EU, through training in green and entrepreneurial skills. In doing so, it sought to provide real answers to the challenges of youth unemployment and rural depopulation. The specific objectives included: identifying training needs and green employment niches in Europe; designing innovative digital tools for training; training youth professionals in green entrepreneurship; promoting sustainable job opportunities in rural areas; strengthening networking between European entities and raising awareness of green employment as a way to a fairer and more sustainable future. All these objectives have been successfully achieved, generating a positive and sustainable impact in the territories involved and creating replicable tools beyond the project, 106 professionals and 374 young people have been trained among the different countries of the consortium, which will generate a medium and long term impact in the rural areas where they live. We hope that this will also help to mitigate the brain drain and slow down the depopulation of rural areas in the EU.
The motivation for us to present this project was none other than to address the challenge of tackling youth unemployment in rural areas and the lack of training in green skills and sustainable entrepreneurship, in line with the European Green Pact and the Skills Strategy for a Sustainable Europe. The consortium's experience in this field had led us to identify that many young people in rural areas face many barriers to accessing job opportunities due to a lack of training in emerging and sustainable sectors, causing them to look for job opportunities and personal growth in urban areas, which amplifies the population drain from Europe's rural areas. In addition, we detected the need to strengthen the skills of the professionals who accompany them in their guidance and labour market insertion, who in many cases lack specific resources on employment and green entrepreneurship. We also observed a low awareness of the potential of the green economy as a driver of development in rural areas, which hindered the generation of new economic and professional opportunities in these territories.