Entrepreneurship Plus

The financial crisis of 2008 devastated national economies around the world. European countries are still recovering. But the spotlight is only now beginning to shine on one issue that could fracture national economies again, the youth unemployment crisis. Many 15- to 24-year-olds are struggling to find jobs, to further their education and to cope with a new world order in which they perceive they have no role. Indeed, while the Eurozone overall unemployment rate came in at 8.9% for September 2017, the lowest rate since February 2009, the region’s youth unemployment for those aged 15-24 remains high. According to recent Eurostat data, 3.722 million young persons (under 25) were unemployed in 2017 in the EU28, a decrease of 380,000 as compared with October 2016. The lowest youth unemployment rates were observed in Germany (6.6 %) and the Czech Republic (7,2%), while the highest were recorded in Greece (40.2 % in August 2017), Spain (38.2 %) and Italy (34.7 %). These figures demonstrate that youth unemployment still remains
high across the EU.

So, with a large proportion of young people unemployed and not having any defined role in society, there is a high risk of social cohesion and of trust in public institutions being undermined, with harm for medium-term growth prospects. Thus, promoting youth entrepreneurship is considered by many one of the main solution to European youth unemployment and societal challenges.

Considering all that, the main objective of “Entrepreneurship Plus” is to provide to youth workers all the necessary skills and competencies in order to be able to understand and deliver entrepreneurial education and learning. The specific objectives to achieve are:

• To provide youth workers a better understanding of entrepreneurship and the role of non-formal learning in supporting entrepreneurship among young people.
• To give youth workers practical methods, tools and practices that they can adopt and adapt to their context and so make it easier to promote entrepreneurship among young people.
• To promote peer learning activities in order to enhance the skills and competences of youth workers in delivering entrepreneurial learning.
• To compose a set of learning materials as open educational resources (OER);
• To develop a digital guide for youth workers to support youth entrepreneurship.
• To explore existing programmes supporting youth work and youth entrepreneurship.

We will pursue two lines of actions to respond to the lack of knowledge, skills, methods, techniques, and tools that impede youth work to contribute to the entrepreneurial learning in young people. In the first line, we will design and realize an e-learning modules (IO1) to help youth workers learn new ways and the extent to which entrepreneurial learning is being applied through youth work to address youth
issues.
The second line, we will develop a Digital Guide (IO2) that will contain all the good practices drafted taking into account the experience and the opinion of all
participants in which the consortium will identify the best approaches to foster entrepreneurial learning in youth organization for promoting youth employability.