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, the event Moving Forward Support for Women Entrepreneurs was organized March 16th at the Residence Palace in Brussels. 

The event was hybrid, which helped people attending from different countries and organisations. 

The event was organised in the framework of the Move It Forward Plus project (MIF+), an Erasmus Plus funded project that aims to support organisations working in the field of female digital entrepreneurship by equipping them with tools and strategies to better support women aspiring entrepreneurs. The proposed tool is the Move It Forward female digital starters weekend (a two-day programme) 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 the speakers presented the importance of supporting female Entrepreneurship, from different angles and perspectives.  

• Cheryl Miller, DLI Director Co-head of EU Delegation to the G20 / Women20, dig into the “why” it is important supporting women entrepreneurship and what is at stake if this is not done 
• The project coordinator, Marina Andrieu from WIDE (Luxembourg) presented the MIF + project tools & methodologies developed and how they can be applied and used for training and mentoring future digital entrepreneurs.  

An interesting part was when the partner organisations, Fundatia Professional (Romania), Led by Her (France), WIDE (Luxembourg) and CTK Rijeka (Croatia), explained the specific actions they have implemented to support women entrepreneurs and the impact they had in their own local communities.

In the last part of the event, which according to the participants was the most heart touching session, three women future entrepreneurs, who are currently enrolled in the MIF+ mentoring program shared their experiences of why and how they started on the entrepreneurship path and how the only fact that they were helped to develop their project idea, first during the MIF digital starters weekend and afterwards with the mentors’ guide, made them actually start their dreams becoming true.

(The article can be found at: http://www.dlii.org/moving-forward-support-for-women-entrepreneurs/ )