The 2008 crisis and the austerity measures taken afterwards have caused high unemployment rates in the European economies. Still today the group aged 30-45 is facing the main barriers to (re)enter the labour market. The challenge for these adults out of employment is to generate a new kind of growth that embraces entrepreneurship as a way to create innovative and competitive jobs. EU Member States need to consider new entrepreneurs as huge potential incubators of creative and innovative ideas that can lead to job creation, lower unemployment rates and better social and economic integration. In this framework, women’s entrepreneurial activity in Europe has not yet reached its full potential.

The Women Entrepreneurship Report published by the Global entrepreneurship monitor for the years 2016/2017 shows that women face additional hurdles with respect to men and that these barriers restrain women’s success in entrepreneurial activities. Generally, women’s enterprises have lower growth expectations and higher rates of discontinuance than men in EU countries. Support for newly established businesses, mentoring, education and training are important tools to sustain women entrepreneurial activities; especially entrepreneurial education has become an important priority for the EU since it creates new companies and jobs, opens up new markets, improves productivity and creates wealth.

WECAN addresses entrepreneurship as a key competence to both start up a business and create value as described by the EntreComp framework. The project aims at enhancing women’s positive perceptions of their skills to start a new business through a coaching journey in which coaches with relevant entrepreneurial experience will explain what it actually takes to be an entrepreneur.

Project Objectives

WECAN aims at strengthening women’s entrepreneurial capacity and empowering the would-be entrepreneurs, or those with a newly established business, with a tailored coaching programme. The specific objectives of the project are to:

• Develop basic and transversal entrepreneurial skills, using a tailored coaching programme
• Increase the sense of initiative and entrepreneurial mindset among female adults would-be or young entrepreneurs
• Promote unconventional and informal learning to build self-confidence, brake barriers and empower female adults out of employment
• Develop a coaching programme that enhances both coaches and mentees, developing new and creative tools that will improve the learning experience of the mentee and the coaching skills of experienced female entrepreneurs
• An open European education and training area thanks to the use of innovative ICT, open educational resources (OER) within the e-platform that will be freely available.

Project Partners