Empowering women entrepreneurs in sparsely populated communities

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W-POWER aims for equal growth and increase in the contribution of women to regional economy in sparsely populated Northern and Arctic communities, as women leaving the North is one of the main challenges to beat in the region. All project partner regions suffer from similar challenges caused by peripherality, which creates a strong argument for transnational cooperation. Project makes a difference for rural businesses by providing transnational learning and capacity building possibilities, but also creating new business concepts and support mechanisms. W-POWER creates new start-ups, helps to take the next step of maturity from start-up, and supports the growing phase of existing SMEs. In addition, business advisory bodies will get new tools for gender-sensitive coaching and diversity management. Project objectives include capacity building of women entrepreneurs, improvement of gender-related business advisory services, and encouragement for self-employment in sparsely populated communities. Development work of W-POWER is based on actual needs, joint collaboration and close engagement with key stakeholders in a quadruple-helix manner. Project partnership is versatile and covers most of the NPA regions. Perspective of the project development work is far beyond the project lifetime, thus resulting longlasting outputs. As a result, greater understanding of regional and transnational barriers which impact negatively on women entrepreneurs will be reached, as well as mechanisms to overcome the barriers. Project implementation is divided to four work packages: T1: Improvement of regional business environment T2: Transnational learning T3: Gender-sensitive coaching concept T4: innovation platform for new pre-startups W-POWER supports the implementation of key EU and national policies related to empowerment of women entrepreneurship. Project also takes into account the Arctic Dimension and horizontal principles.

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