Migrant in Fashion
“Migrant in Fashion” (MF) aims at developing entrepreneurial competences of female migrants in Europe within the Fashion sector through tested innovation in existing offer.
The methodological dimension of the project is based on the use of Digital Storytelling, Design Thinking and Mentoring as a combined, integrated approach of entrepreneurial development allowing the transition from intentions to action in the field of entrepreneurship.
Project target is composed of female migrants aged 18-35 affected by social exclusion. The targets encompasses first and second generation female immigrants.
MF is an approach grounded on transnational cooperation between VET providers, NGOs and Businesses across a geographical cluster of countries providing a balanced picture of the present challenge of migrants’ integration in Europe.
Eurostat quantifies in 164.300 the number of extra-EU nationals who sought asylum in the EU-28 during the third quarter of 2017, posing European countries before the challenge of hosting and integrating the newcomers.
Migrants in Europea countries face several barriers to integration, in societal, educational and employability terms. Newly arrived migrants, in particular, face complex challenges one of them being related to their “insufficient skills and experience (especially language barriers, low levels of education, or a lack of local work experience; difficulties navigating host-country labour markets…); and formal and informal obstacles to employment” (Policies to get immigrants into middle-skilled work in Europe, Migration Policy Institute, 2014).
The European Commission, in its “Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan” highlighted the added value migrant categories can provide to European sustainable growth as potential entrepreneurs, due to the barriers limiting their access to the formal labor market also pushing them towards self-employment. Nevertheless, as the Commission has also highlighted “..notwithstanding that migrants have higher business creation rates than the rest of the population they fail more due to a lack of information, knowledge and language skills”. In the EU 2020 Strategy the necessity of ensuring access to education and training to enshrines to disadvantaged targets (including migrants) and to integrate innovation and entrepreneurship at all levels in the educational field, also through promoting the acquisition of transversal key competences.
The female migrant population has to deal with additional challenges, encompassing cultural, language and gender disadvantag. They are therefore particularly in need of training targeted at work integration and entrepreneurship, as they are facing specific needs, challenges and constraints positioning them among the most fragile groups of our societies.
Fashion is a crucial component of national economies across the regions of North Africa and the Middle East, deeply rooted in local cultural peculiarities and traditional, small-scale modes of production and distribution. Building engagement and capacities of migrants in Fashion entrepreneurship will therefore not only contribute to overcome present barriers and skills mismatches but also lay the grounds for unleashing the added value of innovation inherent in the discovery of the market potential of culturally/traditionally rooted practices and products within the Fashion industry itself, also paving the way for enhancement of market relations between Europe and migrants’ home regions in terms of both trade volumes and quality.
MF will deploy the following activities in the 30 months of the cooperation:
– Identification and assessment of female migrants’ development needs in the Fashion sector and of existing offer of entreprenurial learning in the field.
– Development and piloting of a blended learning training existing female entrepreneurs from each partner country in Mentoring within entrepreneurial education programmes delivered for prospective female entrepreneurs at the country level. The programme will integrate the co-design of the educational contents of local workshops with the participants.
– Implementation of local workshops of entrepreneurial development in the cultural field targeted at prospective female migrants in the fashion sector. The programmes will be implemented in cooperation with local stakeholders in the business field through a combination of face-to-face learning, Mentoring and work-based learning.
– Production of a Guide for operators in the VET and stakeholder fields supporting the latter in the enactment of entrepreneurial support schemes targeted at female migrants in Fashion entrepreneurship.
– Web Platform integrating e-learning modules in multiple language for online educational support of the audience of prospective female migrant entrepreneurs in the Fashion field.