Completed

eNEET Rural: Facilitating entrepreneurship and improving skills of NEETs living in rural areas

Union of Bulgarian Black Sea Local Authorities ·Multi-country

€1.5m

Grant awarded

EEA and Norway Grants Fund for Youth Employment

Programme

26 October 2018

Signed

About this project

The project addresses the challenges of NEETs at age 18-29 living in rural areas and struggling to find a suitable job. NEETs are split to two target groups: one with secondary school diploma and interest in entrepreneurship, the other without diploma seeking trainings to get skilled job. Focusing on innovation and technology in the agricultural sector, we support significant number of young people from Bulgaria, Romania, Spain, Italy, Hungary and Slovenia by offering them a set of toolkit including trainings, start-up competition, staff exchange, coaching and mentoring services helping their employability in agricultural segment either as skilled employee or entrepreneur. During the project lifetime, we aim to achieve the following goals: <ul> <li>300+ NEETs attending “Agro-professional” trainings;</li> <li>900+ NEETs attending “Soft-skills” trainings;</li> <li>ICT Collaborative Platform operating;</li> <li>18 best performing trained NEETs taking part in 3-5 days international mobility actions;</li> <li>30 NEETs attending 1-3 month mobility actions at national agricultural holdings;</li> <li>20 stakeholders attending study visits to improve their activities and influence policy making;</li> <li>45 NEETs in the process of starting their own businesses;</li> <li>200 jobs created.</li> </ul> Our approach is fundamentally conceived to be extended, replicable to support new participants, young people in gaining needed skills on their way to employment or starting own entrepreneurial challenge. Designed to diminish skill shortage of young people living in rural areas and to boost their entrepreneurship to increase the employment in agriculture, the project creates a network of major players of the innovation system and leads to strengthening the agro-innovation-related competences of NEETs.

Bilateral cooperation results

Having a donor project partner from Norway, the eNEET Rural project benefitted valuable support from a professional company with long-term experience in e-learning programs for specific target groups such as migrants, disabled people, NEETs, etc. Inclusion AS, as Norway´s leading supplier of services within the area of entrepreneurship, innovation and job creation, contributed a lot to developing the main project output - the ICT Collaborative platform: www.eneet-elearning.eu (prepared by Inclusion AS, the project deliverable D3.3. presents in detail the applied methodology for implementing online training courses and recommendations provided by the project expertise partner). Constantly during the project, Inclusion AS offered professional advice in developing the content of the training materials, coordinated the training via the online platform, and attended all the partner’s meetings and transnational events by providing good practice examples, knowledge, specialized help, etc. As additional support to the consortium, the expertise partner organized twice per project duration the sharing experience seminars (not foreseen as project activities in the AF) for partners and mentors to provide them with additional skills for implementing the online training. Thanks to the bilateral partner, the rest of the consortium partners had the opportunity to visit Norway and to study in person the presented best practices in youth employment and to establish a reliable partnership with national stakeholders. The expertise partner facilitated the transfer of project results as they are the key partner to transfer the online training beyond the participating countries. The consortium partners plan to continue the established fruitful bilateral collaboration.

Project partners

Center for the Development of the Structural Founds Donor project partner· Romania
Business Research Association National Agro-food Technological Center Extremadura Donor project partner· Spain
Fruto Consulting Ltd Donor project partner· Hungary
STYRIAN TECHNOLOGY PARK - Business Support Centre and Incubator & Regional Centre for Technology Development Donor project partner· Slovenia
Mantuan Oltrepò Consortium Donor project partner· Italy
Inclusion AS Donor project partner· Norway

Other projects in this programme Project website