Expert Team of Peers for Female Entrepreneurship

The XTeam-FEM project resulted from the need to empower female entrepreneurs with micro businesses, through the dissemination of peer learning within them. We felt the need to apply for this project because in the community Mulheres à Obra (Women at Work), that today surpasses 170 000 members, it is quite obvious that many of these women struggle with the lack of access to learning opportunities, both in business management as in more general soft skills. The training programs and courses available in the market are often not affordable, considering their financial constraints, and the experts that provide these contents are usually not prepared to deal with a public with limited digital and business management skills that requires more time in the early stages of the learning process. Due to this necessity, the community Women at Work had, for some time, been providing learning opportunities through an informal peer learning initiative, the Academia MAO, but we wanted to do more, in a more consistent way, and the XTeam-FEM project was designed with this purpose.

The project was designed to promote the constitution of an online epistemic community of female entrepreneurs that provided training to other female entrepreneurs with micro businesses in the areas of business management, digital marketing and sales, social and ecological responsibility and collaborative work among peers. For this purpose, the project adopted a bottom-up participatory approach to training by recruiting experts within the community. We wanted to achieve, and did achieve, the following objectives: ● Improve the business management competences and soft-skills of female entrepreneurs that received training from their more experienced peers, so that they will be better able to implement sustainable businesses. ● Produce useful resources for peer training in female entrepreneurship that are available to the public, online and in open access, in Portuguese, English and German. ● Hold an online Boot Camp with intensive online discussion of the contents being produced, which were presented by the experts to their peers with the moderation of the consortium. ● Hold a final dissemination Conference and Business Fair that included training sessions, lectures and networking sessions.

In the XTeam-FEM project we successfully implemented the activities that had been considered, namely: 1: Recruitment of a team of female entrepreneurs that constituted the epistemic community – we recruited 8 experts that followed the entire training program to the end and delivered the expected results; 2: Development by the team of online open access educational contents – the experts created 8 online courses, one course for each expert, that are now available, in open access, in the Elearning platform in Newzenler that we acquired with the project’s support; 3: Organization of a transnational Boot Camp – we held an online boot camp in which each one of the 8 experts had the opportunity to present her course and receive feed-back from the participants; 4: Construction of a Handbook on Sustainable Female Entrepreneurship – the handbook was created by Storytellme and includes interviews and contributions from the 8 experts. It is now available online, in free access; 5: Organization of a Conference and Business Fair on Female Entrepreneurship – the event was held and a part of it was fully dedicated to the dissemination of the XTeam-FEM project, which included presentations from the national agency for the Erasmus Plus, the consor

We had the following results: • Recruitment of 8 women entrepreneurs – evaluated the project with an average satisfaction level of 4,2, in a scale from 1 to 5 • Creation of a Website and a Facebook page • Organization of 8 mentoring sessions with ISOB and MAO4Action’s expert in elearning, Ana Cristina Rosa • Creation of 8 online courses – 966 registrations so far; 48 completed; 317 ongoing • Boot Camp – 210 registered participants; 50 average attendance in each talk. An average level of satisfaction among the participants of 4,4, in a scale from 1 to 5. The average level of impact was also classified with 4,4. 100% of the respondents wish us to organize similar events in the future. • Publication of an online workbook • Final dissemination conference – 83 participants; 41 speakers; 20 sponsors; 15 participants in the business fair. An average level of satisfaction among the participants of 4,4, in a scale from 1 to 5