Migrants experience higher unemployment and under-employed rates in EU countries compared to native citizens (OECD 2013). An especially vulnerable group is migrant women who are subjects of a double-disadvantage as migrants and as women. As lack of employment is one key challenge for them, entrepreneurship has the potential to provide employment. Within this scenario, bolstering business creation among migrant women, is a key strategy to improve the labour market integration through self-employment of migrant women, and help them to reach their full potential while fostering the creation of added value, innovation, productivity and integration in their host countries.
The target groups of training are:
1) Migrant women residing in the EU
2) Stakeholders: Migrant trainers and workers, unemployment centres and workers, start-up incubators, social workers, municipalities, policy makers etc. who can organise the training.
Objectives
The Kaleidoscope project addressed this challenge by developing entrepreneurship training which focuses especially on soft skills needed in entrepreneurship and that is particularly tailored to the needs of migrant women. The Kaleidoscope training has been developed in a consortium of four partners coming from countries with a different history and situation of migration, Finland, France, Italy and the UK, and with complementary expertise in entrepreneurship, migration, vulnerable groups and women, creativity and formal education.
Results achieved
Based on the highly positive feedback from the target groups and stakeholders, it can be concluded that the Kaleidoscope training addresses well to the needs of all migrant. The training material is the first of its kind, entrepreneurship training especially targeted for migrant women. As the material is also freely available online for all migrant women and for all trainers working with migrants to implement the training, in the future, more migrant women are expected to receive help in their business creation and employment through Entrepreneurship.
Innovation
The Kaleidoscope training is formed of six modules:
1) Action Learning and Coaching
2) Daily Problem Solving, networking, communication
3) Creativity and fun for developing an entrepreneurial mindset + Business modelling as a game
4) Entrepreneurship education for migrant women, resilience and entrepreneurship
5) Intercultural barriers to access market, learning from the hosting culture and how to adapt it
6) Progress and Reflection
The modules are complemented by additional resources. A competence validation at the beginning of training helps migrant women to detect the competence areas which need most attention and to tailor individual training paths. At the end of the training the competence validation helps to see the progress. In addition, a handbook for self-learning supports individual learning and provides complementary material to training.
The development of the training and competence validation benefits from the research and the Kaleidoscope Competence Framework for entrepreneurial support of migrant women developed during the first phase of the project.
All the training material are freely available on the Kaleidoscope Social Learning Platform which, besides providing the training materials online, enables discussions, learning and group work through a forum and through cloud tools. Migrant women have the possibility to upload their personal mini CVs on the platform too.
The project reports and the handbook are also freely available in the results section of the project website https://www.kaleidoscopeproject.eu/about/results/ in the respective language section.
Empowerment
During the project, the Kaleidoscope training was piloted in all partner countries with 54 migrant women of 29 nationalities and four continents: 13 in the UK, 18 in France, 9 in Italy, and 14 in Finland. In addition, 12 of them took part in an international pilot training week. The feedback from the participating women was similar despite their differences. Hence the training seems to be suitable to any national, cultural and educational background. The women felt that the training was highly useful, appropriate and relevant, empowering and increasing their self-belief, and that it helped them during their first steps towards entrepreneurship and in understanding their potential. All the participants showed an increase in mastering entrepreneurial soft skills. The training and the handbook were evaluated positively also by the stakeholders.
Thanks to the results produced through the project, migrant women are able to develop their business thanks to the acquisition of entrepreneurship skills.
