BYTE - Entrepreneurship and IT upskilling for refugees, migrants and mentors - the end of our Erasmus+ project
We are finalising our wonderful and exciting BYTE project which dealt with helping migrants (including refugees from Ukraine) become self-employed, basically trying to help them build a successful enterprise and if possible, with a social benefiting objective. Five European organisations, under the leadership of NGO Simo in Romania, worked closely together for two years to produce hands-on and practical resources that will allow the yielding of direct impact by the target groups. What were they? For the mentors: Mentoring training and support in the form of webinars, zoom sessions, a discussion forum, a “specialised” entrepreneurship mentor from the Hellenic Open University, overseeing the mentors’ support. For the mentees: four autonomous modules available freely on the excellent Moodle platform provided by our Slovenian partner, zoom support sessions, individual support and follow-up information. Our courses are:
- Introduction to Entrepreneurship
- Building a business
- Digital tools for entrepreneurship
- Legislation and finance
Was it successful? Yes, we believe so! More than 50 mentors participated in the trainings and enhanced their skill-sets, while more than 100 mentees registered on our learning platforms to increase their competences. So yes, we believe in its success! But we did not stop there! We organised more than 10 different events and conference participations throughout the project to raise awareness, we contacted our national and regional networks to increase result exploitation, and we promote widely our results, which you can find here: https://www.byteproject.eu.
What did we discover: migrants and refugees are a very difficult target group to both reach and train. Different countries face different challenges relating both to the mentors and the mentees, while motivation was low. Extra effort was put to entice active participation on the platform. Want to learn more?
Make sure to pay us a visit and download our results for your use, or simply pass this information along to anyone who might be interested!
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