The “Being a female entrepreneur” project is a European funded project, aiming at supporting women who are struggling to find new ways to reconcile their professional and personal life to be able to start their own professional careers and set up their businesses within the Creative and Cultural Industries sectors.

In Europe, women represent almost half of the population, which should mean that they also occupy half of the labour market. The reality, however, is that across the EU, women not only earn less per hour than men, but they also face specific challenges when it comes to becoming entrepreneurs and autonomous. At the same time, in recent years, participation in permanent and lifelong learning by adults has been one of the main challenges to be tackled in all EU countries. Hence, it is important to explore new and attractive educational paths in order to provide women with the necessary tools to be fit and competent in the business world.
The partners implementing the project: The Italian Chamber of Commerce and Industry for Spain (CCIS), DomSpain, p-consulting is an IT, Training and Consulting company, Coopération Bancaire pour l’Europe (CBE) – EEIG, Agency for Rural Development of Zadar County, Eurosuccess Consulting and Bucovina Institute, firmly believe that it is necessary to harness the potential of culture to become an economic engine in national and international markets. The partners are determined to develop a project that creates opportunities and empowers women entrepreneurs to launch cultural and creative companies.

By taking part in this project, women entrepreneurs’ initiative and leadership senses will increase, resulting in expanding their business. A larger cultural diversity understanding, increased value of the European cultural heritage and more opportunities in quality and innovative training paths for women entrepreneurs are being created. The project offers an interactive map, where women entrepreneurs could look for examples, and ideas and gain inspiration from companies in the cultural sector across Europe. Moreover, for women entrepreneurs can be a tool for their business visibility, reaching all the partner’s network in seven different languages (English, Greek, French, Romanian, Spanish, Italian and Croatian). They can also assess their entrepreneurial competencies and social skills in order to be conscious of their level of development and take action with the training course to gain knowledge and experience as an entrepreneur in the creative and cultural sector. Moreover, an ICT tool for the assessment of entrepreneurial (cultural) competencies was designed, which allows users to autonomously analyze their own skills in the sector with the aim of becoming more aware of their own capabilities through an innovative element whose outcome is its approach to the European ENTERCOMP Framework, as well as a social skills self-assessment tool in order to establish a set of key soft skills that are fundamental to becoming an entrepreneur with the aim of increasing women’s sense of initiative and leadership. After the assessment, aspiring women or new cultural entrepreneurs can enrol on an online course for analyzing not only the financial, legal and management aspects associated with entrepreneurship, but also the concepts of creativity, innovation, democratization and digitalization of culture.

All these resources are available and can be downloaded for free to guarantee their transferability and can be easily adapted to other sectors, communities and learning contexts. Be up to date with all news and developments through the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/FemaleEntrepreneurProject