Turkey has hosted 1.8 million Syrians, nearly half of whom fled the country. This figure represents almost 98% of the total refugee population, making Turkey the country that hosted the largest number of refugees that year.

Social enterprises are of great importance in creating new job opportunities for migrants, strengthening their empowerment and enabling them to work in a fair and equal environment, including as entrepreneurs.

However, education systems do not provide sufficient entrepreneurship training, and most people do not have the skills needed to enter today’s entrepreneurial landscape.

Edu4Sent was designed through strong cross-sector cooperation among countries representing some of Europe’s most important entry points for migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers arriving via the Mediterranean.

The core aim of the project is to give migrants and refugees the opportunity to develop skills and access knowledge and competences that can enable them to build a sustainable livelihood, including the possibility of becoming entrepreneurs and thereby contributing to the creation of further jobs.

The project aims to help young adult refugees and asylum seekers develop social entrepreneurship skills so they can create their own jobs.

Over 24 months, we aim to improve the social entrepreneurship knowledge and skills of educators working in organisations with low-qualified young adult refugees and asylum seekers, in order to support them in promoting social entrepreneurship in the long term, by creating educational content and an open access online course (OOC) with five partners from Turkey, Greece, Poland, and Italy, thereby increasing their capacity in social entrepreneurship education.

Project website: www.edu4sent.org

PROJECT COORDINATOR:
PAYDAS EGITIM KULTUR VE SANAT DERNEGI – Zonguldak, Turkey

Partners:

• ZONGULDAK VALİLİĞİ – Zonguldak, Turkey

• INSTITUTE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT – Larissa, Greece

• DANMAR COMPUTERS SP ZOO – Rzeszow, Poland

• FORMAZIONE E COMUNIONE SOCIETÀ COOPERATIVA SOCIALE ONLUS – Sicily, Italy

INTELLECTUAL OUTPUTS

O1: Online course for social entrepreneurship
A multilingual platform will be developed to create an online space as a link for the project’s target groups (educators/professionals working in organisations providing support to migrant populations). It will host all digital learning materials created during the project and support project dissemination: events, activities, materials, and results. The aim is to provide educators working with low-qualified young adult refugees and asylum seekers with the tools to promote knowledge, skills, and competences in social entrepreneurship. It will include a course, trainer guidelines, assessment tools, and an e-learning platform. The content will be tailored to the needs of persons with disabilities and vulnerable social groups. It will be available free of charge and easily accessible in English, Turkish, Polish, Greek, and Italian.

O2: Educational content for social entrepreneurship
The educational content of the online course will be developed specifically for the target group, with a unique and innovative focus on how participants (migrants and refugees) acquire the appropriate social entrepreneurship skills to establish their own business in the different reference areas across the partner countries. The educational content will be determined through the needs analysis carried out in the preliminary phase of the project. The goal is therefore to encourage learning and the development of ideas about the different types of enterprises they would like to be involved in.

EVENTS

Kick-off meeting
The Erasmus+ kick-off meeting for “Edu4Sent: Developing the Competences of Educators to Promote Social Entrepreneurship of Adults with Migrant Background”, funded in 2019 by the Turkish National Agency under the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership for Adult Education, was held on 20 and 21 February in Zonguldak, Turkey.

The meeting was organised by the applicant organisation Paydaş Eğitim Kültür ve Sanat Derneği together with the partners Zonguldak Valiliği from Turkey, Formazione e Comunione Società Cooperativa Sociale Onlus from Italy, and the Institute of Entrepreneurship Development from Greece.

The project aims to improve the social entrepreneurship knowledge and skills of educators working for organisations with low-qualified young adult refugees and asylum seekers, so as to support them in promoting social entrepreneurship in the long term by creating educational content and a free online course with five partners from Turkey, Greece, Poland, and Italy.