Advancing Rural Development through Entrepreneurship Education for Adults Erasmus Project

Project Title

Advancing Rural Development through Entrepreneurship Education for Adults

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for adult education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Rural development and urbanisation; Entrepreneurial learning – entrepreneurship education; Cooperation between educational institutions and business

Project Summary

Advancing Rural Development through Entrepreneurship Education for Adults

Project background
Rural depopulation is becoming a major policy challenge in Europe as the population and employment have become increasingly concentrated in the urban centres and rural regions showing an ever-continuing downfall in terms of the population size. Further pressing challenges in rural areas include risk of poverty and social exclusion, and raising unemployment rates. (EC,2018). Concomitant with these challenges, ARDENT project is targeted to Adult learners in the rural communities (aged 25 and over) of various professional backgrounds possessing some formal education but currently unemployed*. It aims at improving the transfer of competences from HEIs in the sense of lifelong further learning to the Adult communities in Rural areas, to seed in them the basis to become job creators and not job seekers. Through a Community-Based Learning approach to entrepreneurial skills development among adult learners, ARDENT seek to integrate them into a process where they need to generate creative solutions to real-life challenges of rural communities. In this way, the university is able to engage with the society and achieve synergies through lifelong learning in the form of entrepreneurship to promote rural development.

To support this change, ARDENT will:
(I) foster development of entrepreneurship skills among adult learners targeted at rural development
(II) increase engagement and activities of the HEIs within their local environment through their continuing education offers in the form of lifelong learning
(III) boost attractiveness of rural regions among youth and urban communities, by creating new employment opportunities
(IV) improve the quality of services in the rural regions, bringing in innovative solutions to increase quality of life
(VI) widely disseminate the results across Europe, to bolster integration of rural entrepreneurship and collaboration practices in HEI curriculum.

Project approach and outputs
During its lifetime, ARDENT project will launch 5 rural councils in partner regions, analyse needs, and accordingly design and implement the Rural Entrepreneurship teaching program at partner HEIs, carry out 20 rural entrepreneurship adult student projects in respective regions, and increase capacity by offering workshops to rural communities and by expanding their networks and interaction with their urban counterparts.

This will include producing 4 main intellectual outputs:
IO1 – Rural Council Building Tool Box with an objective to create 5 rural councils, unifying the region and enabling cross-institutional collaboration.
IO2 – Rural Consultation Roadmap & Needs Analysis Reports with an objective to (1) identify the rural needs and bridge the divide between the HEI and its regional community through regional consultation events that require innovative solutions
IO3 – Rural Entrepreneurship Community-based Learning Pack, a two-semester training course which will develop relevant entrepreneurial skills through developing a minimum of 3 entrepreneurial concepts addressing societal and business challenges. The ideas will be pitched to the community and implemented by the students.
IO4 – ARDENT Rural Knowledge Port, to facilitate the interaction, sharing of ideas and resources, function as a knowledge repository and be the backbone of the education program, we will develop an online knowledge port to also allow us to scale the project beyond its current size.

The outputs will foster:
(i) entrepreneurial skills development among adult learners (125 adult learners, 25 academics from all regions attended/ participated in the challenge program).
(ii) improvement in entrepreneurship lifelong learning offers at HEIs (the course program integrated into partner HEI adult educational offers)
(iii) economic and social development in the rural areas where the project partner organisations/HEIs are located (45+ local businesses/ community members will attend the workshops at national launch events, 20 student projects will be implemented, involved rural populations will benefit from the improvements in social and cultural life)
(vi) strengthened relationships between HEIs and their rural communities, through national events, online networks, and e-mail dissemination (2,500+ partner HEI and UIIN contact database)
(v) launch of Rural Knowledge Port that will contain project outputs, 200+ self-learning materials as OERs, as well as the rural-urban network database of 100+ rural and urban businesses, NGOs, and other relevant organisations from each region
(vi) extensive dissemination of the project process and results among other EU regions where rural development is recognised as a priority (5 national launches and 1 international showcase event)

Project Website

http://ruralentrepreneurs.eu/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 238485 Eur

Project Coordinator

FH Münster University of Applied Sciences & Country: DE

Project Partners

• UNIVERSITY INDUSTRY INNOVATION NETWORK BV
• UNIVATIONS GMBH
• UNIWERSYTET EKONOMICZNY W KRAKOWIE
• INSTITUTO POLITECNICO DE VIANA DE CASTELO
• SVEUCILISTE JOSIPA JURJA STROSSMAYERA U OSIJEKU