Developing an innovative approach towards creating the appropriate ecosystem to support young migrants’ entrepreneurship through a combination of education and training, mentoring and access to finance is the aim of the Young Migrants Capacity Building (YMCB) project, lead by AEIDL.
Evidence shows that migrants are more likely to start businesses than their native-born peers (OECD, International Migration Outlook, 2011). For many migrants (both low and high-skilled), entrepreneurship is a strategy to overcome obstacles with regard to labour market integration and to upward social mobility.
Leading a consortium of seven partners, AEIDL started in January 2019 the implementation of the entrepreneurial Young Migrants Capacity Building (YMCB) project, funded by DG Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs).
The project aimed at creating a coordinated programme of action to provide young migrants with the means to develop their own business according to entrepreneurial knowledge made accessible through a journey of education and training, mentoring, networking and access to finances.
The approach was tested in four target locations – Vienna (Austria), Brussels (Belgium), Florence (Italy), the Netherlands – with the aim to scaling up and replicating it in other territories. In addition, a Community of Practice of Young Migrant Entrepreneurs was developed and enhanced within the project that allowed partners and organisations working with young migrants and targeted groups to exchange experience and lessons learned, improve their knowledge and scale up their good practices.
YMCB brought together seven partners actively working in the field of migrants’ entrepreneurship and business incubation for youth and social enterprises, more specifically the Microfinance Centre (Poland), the Centre for Social Innovation (Austria), Oxfam (Italy), SPARK (Netherlands), Adecco Training (Italy), The Hague University of Applied Sciences (Netherlands) and AEIDL.
