Category: Projects

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Request for Proposal

Subject: Training services to support the implementation of professional training for an organisation working with migrant women and migrant women entrepreneurs 

General Introduction: Training services will be organised in the framework of the ATHENA Project – Approaches To valorisethe High EntrepreneuriAl potential of migrant women. The objective of the ATHENA project is to contribute to the economic and social integration of migrant women in the EU society by improving the services of entrepreneurship support to migrant women and creating a specific entrepreneurial path for them in the regional contexts where the project activities are developed.  

Needs: 

Two different trainings will be organised by the Digital Leadership Institute (DLI), within the context of the ATHENA Project: 

1. Training for professionals working with migrant women: The objective of this training is to improve the services provided by the public or private organizations to migrant women on entrepreneurship. The aim is to build capacities of organizations professionals working with migrant women, with additional ad hoc knowledge that will help and better equip them to deliver the services of support for migrant women on entrepreneurship path. The professionals from the organizations working with entrepreneurs will be trained in the different topics that have been identified as missing or weak by the needs and demands of the migrant women. The topics are: Administrative and legal issues, access to finance, psychological preparedness of a migrant women, cultural diversity and sensitivity. DLI is looking for an organisation or independent professional who can provide a lecture on one or more of the above-mentioned topics.  The training for professionals working with migrant women will last half a day. 

2. Training for migrant women: The objective of this bootcamp is to provide (migrant) women with the skills, resources and access to expertise necessary to inspire them to take up entrepreneurship. The overall aim is to contribute to the economic and social integration of migrant women in the EU society by improving the services of entrepreneurship support oriented to migrant women and accompanying them on the challenging entrepreneurial path. 

Each training will address three sections, each providing a specific set of skills: Legal skills, business skills, digital skills.

  • Legal skills: Administrative and legal overview, access to finance/ Belgian founding schemes, cultural diversity in the business environment. 
  • Business skills: Vision & mission identification, Business design, strategic planning
  • Digital Skills: Digital tools to manage your accounting, building an e-commerce website.

The bootcamp will last three half-days. 

Requirements: 

Training for professionals working with migrant women – four independent sessions are foreseen under the following topics: 

1. Administrative and legal advice: the aim is to give an overview of the administrative and legal requirements the migrant women wishing to become entrepreneurs need to go undergo. This advice is to to make it easier to deal with the administrative requirements to start/run a business. Suggested length of the session is 1h.

2. Access to finance: Part of setting up and running a business requires dealing with legal questions such as registering the enterprise, obtaining permits, filling out tax reports and others. For a migrant who has no previous experience in the area and is also not used to the administrative system and institutions in the host country, this might be a significant obstacle and a migrant entrepreneur may face greater difficulties than a native counterpart in navigating regulations and administrative red tape. Migrant entrepreneurs may also need specific advice regarding immigration regulations (for example concerning permit renewal and status change). It consists of direct provision of loans and other (micro) credit instruments, provision of facilities where starting the business, or support with the application process to obtain a loan from another institution. Suggested length of the session is 1h. 

3. Psychological preparedness of a migrant women Migrant workers show an increase in the incidence of serious, psychotic, anxiety, and post-traumatic disorders due to a series of socio-environmental variables, such as loss of social status, discrimination, and separations from the family. This causes low life conditions, which is also due to marginalization from the social context and strenuous work. It is therefore essential to increase knowledge among professionals working with migrants about this issue and promote wellbeing for this vulnerable job category.Suggested length of the session is 30 to 40 min.

4. Cultural sensitivity in business:   Migrants often lack familiarity with the (business) environment and the market where they start the business. Similar is true to the professionals working with migrants that not always are prepared to deal with diversities. Cultural sensitivity training may help to understand what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior toward people based on their race, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. This can help to avoid situations leading to discrimination, harassment, and retaliation. Suggested length of the session is 30 to 40 min.

Training for migrant women: The bootcamp will be divided in three independent sections, each providing a specific set of topics/skills:

1. Legal skills: the aim is to provide all the information a migrant woman needs in order to set up and run a business in Belgium: 

  • Administrative and legal overview – the aim is to give an overview of the administrative and legal requirements the migrant women wishing to become entrepreneurs need to go undergo. This advice is to make it easier to deal with the administrative requirements to start/run a business. Suggested length of the session is 1h.
  • Access to finance/ Belgian founding schemes; Part of setting up and running a business requires dealing with legal questions such as registering the enterprise, obtaining permits, filling out tax reports and others. For a migrant who has no previous experience in the area and is also not used to the administrative system and institutions in the host country, this might be a significant obstacle and a migrant entrepreneur may face greater difficulties than a native counterpart in navigating regulations and administrative red tape. Migrant entrepreneurs may also need specific advice regarding immigration regulations (for example concerning permit renewal and status change). It consists of direct provision of loans and other (micro) credit instruments, provision of facilities where starting the business, or support with the application process to obtain a loan from another institution. Suggested length of the session is 1h.
  • Intercultural diversity in the business environment – Migrants often lack familiarity with the (business) environment and the market where they start the business. Cultural sensitivity training may help to understand what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior toward people based on their race, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. Suggested length of the session is 1h to 1h30.

2. Business skills: This set of supporting measures consists of training on matters that are related to starting and conducting a business. When they have no pre-migration business experience, or they do not have previous business training, migrant entrepreneurs often need to improve their business skills. Group business support normally consist of training sessions to develop a set of those skills, such as how to develop a business plan, accountancy skills, and marketing strategies, vision & mission identification, product identification, business design, strategic planning. Suggested length of the session 4h.

3. Digital Skills: The aim is to provide and teach how to use different digital tools that can help to set up and run a business. These can include the following:

  • How to manage the accounting by using different digital tools. Suggested session length 1h to 1h30.
  • How to build an e-commerce website. Suggested session length 1h to 1h30. 
  • Digital marketing by using specific tech tools. Suggested session length 1h to 1h30.

The trainings will be carried out in English, but the trainer will be asked to share the training material in advance so that this can be translated in the participants languages by DLI.

Timing: The training for professionals will be carried out in person in Brussels on 24 May 2022, from 2 pm to 6 pm CET. The training for migrant women will be carried out in person in Brussels on 17, 18 & 19 June 2022, from 9am to 1 pm CET.

How to Respond: Any organisation or independent professional can propose to deliver one or more of the noted sessions. The service will be remunerated per the proposed offering and based on mutually agreed terms.

To submit a proposal, please send a document in PDF format, maximum five single-spaced A4 pages, plus Annexes (CVs, past project experiences, draft curricula, etc.) which includes: 

  • Target training session(s)
  • Description of the proposed training, including topics to be covered in the session;
  • Price, including time (quoted in person days) and materials, plus VAT, and validity term;
  • Confirmation of availability for training dates; and
  • Background information for the contracting person/organisation, including name, legal address, VAT number, etc.
  • Annex: ZIP file including CV/Bio of expert/s, previous project experience, references, etc.

Each Proposal with Annex should be sent to the following email address: dliiorg(at)gmail(dot)com

Deadline for proposal submission is 10 May 2022 at midnight CET.

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Moving Forward Support for Women Entrepreneurs

Women-led entrepreneurship can act as an enabler of women’s economic empowerment and gender equality and contribute to the post-COVID economic recovery.

On this important topic, DLI and it’s partners organized an event entitled Moving Forward Support for Women Entrepreneurs on 16 March 2022 at the Residence Palace in Brussels.  The event was hybrid, which supported people to attend from a large variety of countries and organisations.

Moving Forward Support for Women Entrepreneurs was organised in the framework of the Move It Forward Plus project (MIF+), an Erasmus Plus-funded project to support organizations working in the field of female digital entrepreneurship by equipping them with tools and strategies to better support aspiring women entrepreneurs. The highlighted “tool” was the Move It Forward female digital starters weekend, a two-day program with the aim of bringing together teen and adult women to provide them with the digital skills, resources and access to expertise necessary to inspire them to take up digital entrepreneurship.

During the event, speakers highlighted the importance of supporting women-led entrepreneurship from different angles and perspectives.  

First, Cheryl Miller, DLI Director and Co-head of EU Delegation to the G20 / Women20, dug into why it is important to support women entrepreneurs and what is at stake if this is not done.

The project coordinator, Marina Andrieu from WIDE(Luxembourg) then presented tools and methodologies developed in the MIF + project, and how they can be applied and used for training and mentoring of future digital entrepreneurs. 

Next, MIF+ partner organisations, Fundatia Professional (Romania), Led by Her (France), WIDE (Luxembourg), and CTK Rijeka (Croatia), described the specific actions they implemented to support women entrepreneurs and the impact this had in their local communities.

In the final and most heart-warming part of the event, three future women entrepreneurs who are currently enrolled in the MIF+ mentoring program, shared their experiences of why and how they started on their entrepreneurship journey. In each case, they underscored the fact that getting support to develop their project idea—first during the MIF digital starters weekend and afterwards with guidance from a mentor—is what has permitted them to start making their entrepreneurship dreams come true.

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“COGE” Gender Equality Contest for Young People Launched

On 21 March 2022, the R&I PEERS project announced the “COGE: Contest on Gender Equality” competition, inviting young people between the ages of 18 and 25 who are studying in Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Israel, Slovenia, Spain or Tunisia, to submit a video of up to three minutes long describing their experiences, knowledge, perception and proposals for Gender Equality.

Information about the competition—including application form, rules for participation, and contact—is available online at the following link: https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/COGE

Deadline for submitting completed videos: Midnight 31 May 2022 Central European Time

The R&I PEERS project partners include the Digital Leadership Institute of Belgium, the Greek General Secretariat for Demographic and Family Policy and Gender Equality, the Confindustria association, and seven Universities and Research Institutions from Europe and the Mediterranean. The project is coordinated by the University of Salerno in Italy.

The project “Pilot Experiences for Improving Gender Equality in Research Organizations – R&I PEERS” has been funded under the HORIZON 2020 program (GA 788171) and aims to create and evaluate pilot experiences from a gender perspective which do not limit the participation and career of women in Research and Innovation.

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Organise Your Own Move It Forward Event!

As an outcome of the Move It Forward+ project, funded by the European Union Erasmus+ program, a toolkit for organising your very own Move It Forward (“MIF”) event–as well as CSR and mentoring activities to promote women (digital) entrepreneurs–is now available free, online for the public!

Move It Forward is an event footprint–sometimes called a “hackathon” or “tech-for-good” initiative–originally developed by the Digital Leadership Institute as part of its inQube “female digital accelerator” program. With MIF and other activities, inQube aims to support teen and adult women entrepreneurs by providing community, digital and business skills, and other resources they need to launch and grow successful digitally-enabled and digitally-driven enterprises.

Including Move It Forward+ project activities, the Move It Forward event has been organized 20 times in 9 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, reaching thousands of participants, since 2014. In 2018, MIF received a Global Mobile Award, and in 2019 was recognised as European finalist for the UN ITU EQUALS in Tech Award.

Materials developed and made available within the MIF+ project are available for download on the Move It Forward+ website and below.

Please feel free to contact us for more information about and support with organising a Move It Forward event in your own city!

1. Guides: How to organise a Move it forward+ Event

We provide our Guides in 5 different languages, to support you with the organisation of your Move it forward+ event.

2. Event Preparation Documents

You can find additional and printable materials here:

3. In-event Documents

You can find a variety of printable material here:

4. Guides: How to organise mentoring sessions

You will find here all the resources related to the organisation of mentoring sessions linked to your Move it foward+ event.

Annexe n°1: Impact and assessment of women programmes and events supporting women in entrepreneurship.

Annexe n°2: Mentor’s portfolio & Mentee’s portfolio

5. Event Presentations

Our Event Presentation will be available soon!

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Women4Afghanistan

The recent withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan after twenty years of occupation created a power vacuum and resurgence of domestic forces that has triggered a humanitarian crisis.  The clamping down on human rights and freedoms, especially impacting girls and women, is forcing flight of hundreds of thousands of Afghan nationals to other parts of the globe. Some of the most high profile evacuations have been of the Afghan Girls Robotics and Girls Soccer teams. There are thousands of harrowing evacuation stories, not all of which have been successful, and countless more at-risk girls and women are still living in uncertainty in Afghanistan. 

In her role as Head of EU Delegation to the G20 Women20 stakeholder interest group, Cheryl Miller, DLI Director, played an instrumental role in delivering a Declaration of Support for Afghan Women and Girls to G20 leaders, including EC President von der Leyen and US President Biden, ahead of a 24 August urgent G7 meeting on Afghanistan. President von der Leyen’s remarks there focused on the plight of Afghan girls and women: “We need to help mostly those who are at immediate risk. And those are women, girls and children, who make up the vast majority of internally displaced people – 80% of the internally displaced people in Afghanistan are women and girls.”

As Afghan refugees attempt to make their way to other countries, they will need support – for evacuating from Afghanistan, arriving to a new location, and in assimilating long-term as economic, political and social actors in their adopted homes. An initiative called Women4Afghanistan was launched by Anne Ravanona and Katharina Miller, EU delegates to the G20/W20, in order to rally support for Afghan girls and women on this path.  More information on how to contribute to this critical work may be found here: 

https://www.women4afghanistan.org/

As Afghan refugees arrive and begin the process of integrating into their new home communities, it will be up to programs like AMIF and the ATHENA project to specifically support Afghan women and their sister refugees from around the world, by delivering on its remit to promote entrepreneurship by women migrants. DLI and the ATHENA partners look forward to the opportunity to support the women and girls of Afghanistan, and women migrants from all over the world, in integrating and achieving financial independence for these most vulnerable.