'She Empowers', Economical Empowerment of Women through Education
“She Empowers" was designed by a group of women, mainly from the field of non-formal adult education, to improve services aiming to empower women without work to access, or return to, the world of economic activity.
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What was it?
A 3-year European-level project (September 2014-August 2017) with a focus on empowering unemployed women to get involved in economic activity.
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Why did we organise it?
Because we believed that the potential of women could be used much more than was actually happening...
How?
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By piloting innovative, non-formal education and support processes to reach women where they were – in their own communities!
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By encouraging cooperation on a cross-sector level to improve their access and progression to the world of work in more sustainable ways.
Who was involved?
The partners were from municipal and non-governmental organisations across 6 European countries (Belgium, France, Iceland, Italy, Spain and Sweden).
STEPS TO EMPOWERMENT
Maps - Time for Exploration & Discovery (12 months)
Each Country Coordinator investigated and mapped services supporting women’s economic empowerment in their area. They explored local contexts, identified obstacles and collected examples of good practice as well as seeking potential partnerships with other organisations.
A Learning Activity in Belgium in May 2015 rounded off this phase with country representatives presenting findings and inspiring each other to action! The She Empowers Website was created at the end of this phase in order to present the processes and results of the Mapping Exercise.
Acts - Time for Action: Piloting & Identifying Training Needs
(18-21 months)
Each Country Coordinator played 3 roles during the next period:
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a) creating and coordinating local support networks composed of organisations from the field of women’s employability, enterprise and education. These networks supported the Pilot Actions to promote better cross-sector cooperation and more coherent strategies to support women’s empowerment.
b) implementing Pilot Actions - assisting network partners to introduce new elements, or reinforce existing ones, in services offered to unemployed women. These included, for example, new cross-sector partnerships, broadening access to services, reinforcing a specific element of work, finding resources for complementary areas of work etc.
c) identifying the learning & training needs of professionals working with the target group. This was essential for the start-up of the Training Module development phase. A Learning Activity in France in October 2016 gave us the opportunity to have a mid-way evaluation moment. Representatives from the different countries exchanged information and issues arising. These discussions were the basis of the production of A Competence Framework for Professionals Working with Unemployed Women.
Learns - Time for Learning with, and from, each other – and Training Others!
Learning together was an important transversal aim of this project: 4 Learning Activities took place in total. Apart from those mentioned above, 2 others took the form of experimental 5-day Training Modules in Belgium and Italy in spring 2017. These were developed by pairs of Country Coordinators to support professionals from different sectors working in the field of (un)employment. These modules involved around 20 participants each time (4-5 per country) and allowed us to respond to training needs we had identified. Read more here.
Shares - Time for sharing and multiplying the learning
During the project, 4 documents were produced by members to help us disseminate our thinking. In the final months of the project, our results were finalised: the website was developed further to encompass the whole project, the Competence Framework evolved out of what was initially a mid-way evaluation report and, finally, the Training Manual: Empowering Training Modules to Support Female Employability.
We hope all of these can be useful to adult educators and trainers responsible for organising professional training courses with “empowerers” across different sectors. Read more here.
The Initial Context
When we planned this project, the economic situation - since the crisis of 2008 - had been at the root of a huge increase in unemployment figures across Europe. No country had been spared and it is common knowledge that the longer people are unemployed, the more difficult it becomes for them to re-integrate active working life.
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Women who are not working are, traditionally, less visible in the official unemployment figures and, therefore, are often excluded (even if unintentionally) from governmental employment and training initiatives but, nonetheless, they constitute a huge bank of unused resources in our societies.
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Training and employment initiatives undertaken towards this target group have been largely uncoordinated with no real long-term strategy to build on. There was a lack of networking opportunities between statutory and voluntary agencies and we believed that more cooperation could lead to better understanding of each other’s work and encourage more coherent “progression routes” for unemployed women thus promoting a better take-up of services.
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More innovative training and non-formal education programmes reaching women in their own communities were called for…
This project has been funded with support of the European Commission. This website reflects the views only of the authors and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
