Worldwide statistics are clear, where it is estimated that approximately 70% of family-owned business do not survive into the 2nd generation and 90% no longer controlled by the 3rd generation of the family. Succession between generations in family businesses is less straightforward than it used to be. Today’s generation is growing up in a commercial culture which is radically different from that in which earlier family members took on responsibility. Family-owned businesses play a vital role in the economic development of a country. Most successful companies around the globe started as family owned businesses. The young entrepreneurs of the G20 hold the key to solving our youth unemployment problem, but we must help them to achieve their potential 66% of the young entrepreneurs say they need say entrepreneurial skills need to be specifically taught. Thus, the role of family businesses in the European economy is paramount to the success of the countries that comprise the biggest economic region in the world.The @theEUAGORA project aims to create an online training and knowledge platform particularly addressing young entrepreneurs who are about to inherit or are in the first couple of years of running a family business in the retail sector. All training material will be OERs available for e-learning and m-devices supporting ICT-based training, social learning models, a gamified approach, using specific authoring software and translated in all partner languages, accessible through the platform. Guest access will be available and connection with other OER databases will be made. This target group of young people is in need of particular and specific knowledge, not too generic but practical and according to their needs, and skills in using existing, empirical knowledge turning it into competitive advantage. These young entrepreneurs need to have business skills and knowledge, either informal or formal education and training period (external and/or internal to the firm), in order to offer two intertwined effects on the family firm. Their skills, experience and capabilities in leading organizations are important conditions to gain credibility and legitimacy (Barach Ganitsky, 1995; & Chrisman et al., 1998). Besides, the expertise and stock of knowledge of these people determines the absorptive capacity (Cohen and Levithal, 1990, p. 128) that avoids delays and fosters the ability to exploit the new knowledge. Early exposure to the family business (Fairlie and Robb, 2005, Ward, 1987; and Barach et al., 1988), outside work experience (Barach and Ganitsky, 1995), formal education (Jon C. Carr, 2007 and Goldberg, 1996; and Morris et al., 1997) and training programs (Asia-Pacific Entrepreneurship Development Institute, 2014 and Churchill and Hatten, 1987) are considered factors positively correlated with a smooth succession for the future generation.The project aims through the platform and project activities, to provide young family business entrepreneurs in the urban retail sector, the necessary skills, competences and knowledge to achieve a professional, advanced and excellent management to become leading, modern and established entrepreneurs. The target group is aged between 18-30 years old with real needs of keeping family businesses alive and competing with global actors in Europe today facing economic difficulties. Advanced OER training material will be designed and developed using gamification elements and learning outcomes design, thus conforming to ECVET, training material accessible through multiple devices, user friendly system allowing for cross-country collaboration and exchange of knowledge and skills. Highly interactive, the infrastructure and project activities will be dedicated to retail shop owners training them on subjects such as innovation management, social media marketing, international competition, local markets and national markets etc. Expert interviews, good practices and collaboration circles will be created for the enhancement of skills and testing of knowledge acquired. The project aims to contribute to the specific objective of improving the level of key competences and skills and strengthening the link between youth entrepreneurial spirit to the labour market.

The gender gap widens: The World Economic Forum predicts that the gender gap in employment will not be closed until the year 2133. There are especially critical sectors, such as the industrial sector, which represents 6,4% of the total EU population occupied and is dominated mainly by men(78.4%). In particular, within the foundry sector, the female occupation is so low that there are not even records in this regard. This means that a very high percentage of the population (women)is not accessing the professional opportunities related to the foundry and are underrepresented in many technological and digital professions.(EC-Gender segregation in the labour market).Increasing labour-force participation and raising the employment rate of women is paramount to meeting the Europe 2020 headline target. In this sense, in order to face this global problem, different organisms and public administrations are implementing different measures that until now have not been effective and do not have the expected result. A positive aspect is that, the foundry sector is starting to promote the technological and creative aspects of their operations. Robots are increasingly doing the heavy lifting and hazardous work, so workers don’t need to be a certain height, a certain weight, or have a certain strength to be able to, say, program a CNC machine. Those jobs are open to anyone, and the skill shortage in manufacturing is yet one more reason to work harder to attract women to those positions.For all this,it is necessary to reinforce and look for initiatives to facilitate the access of more women to traditionally male jobs, to the KET and to technological training to ensure the long-term competitiveness of the EU. The European Union estimates that by 2020 90% of the jobs of the future will require digital skills linked to the KETs, so the incorporation of women into studies related to science and technology is critical. CASTWOMAN project aims to contribute to reduce the gender gap in the foundry industry, by highlighting female role models in this professional field and raise awareness among female VET trainees to approach and mobilize the skills and competencies related to KETs to respond the demands to the new century foundries.The main expected result is to develop a multimedia training platform multimedia training platform to provide place and tools to introducing VET female students to non-traditional foundry job paths, fostering the gender-inclusion. The platform is aimed as a tool to empower young women and exploring the range of skills that are needed for a great variety of jobs within the foundry sector, especially those linked to the technologies 4.0.Another results:-Positive female role models in the foundry sector: 15 female workers of the foundry sector will be interviewed to have a clear picture on what set of skills are important and needed to be improved to ensure the success and sustainability of their jobs-Six Foundry Motivation Hub: a set of new dynamic learning spaces for female VET students and female foundry workers to get together, communicate and rise interest in the foundry sector. More than 125 attendants will participate in these forums.-Digital Toolkit for VET trainers and youth career facilitators: a comprehensive career guidance package of resources and training material to empower VET trainers, counselors and career guidance facilitators to find the right kind of information that will benefit the female students by breaking gender stereotypes and facilitating women’s career planning to entry into the foundry market.Expected impact on the main target group: -The VET trainers, facilitators and career guidance facilitators, will have and be trained on the right kind of information and activities to break the gender stereotypes and training resources that will benefit the young women as well as facilitate women’ career planning and entry into the foundry market. -VET female students and young women trainees of non formal VET will be introduced in non-traditional foundry job paths, fostering the gender-inclusion, by empowering them to explore the range of skills that are needed for a great variety of jobs within the foundry sector.Impact on indirect target groups:-VET organisations will update training regarding the main technological trends within the foundry sector and the future jobs, main occupational profiles in KETs within the foundry sector and the most demanded soft and technical skills and competences fostering gender quality in the labour market. -Career counselors and career guidance services providers will be equipped with working tools and materials for the up-to-date jobs and professions within the foundry sector.-Foundries and industrial companies will meet potential new female employees during contact making sessions in valorization events and to have qualified workers, no matter the gender issue.-Female employees of foundries will be visible feminine referents.

"Equality between women and men is one of the European Union's founding values. It goes back to 1957 when the principle of equal pay for equal work became part of the Treaty of Rome. The European Union's achievements in fostering equality between women and men have helped to change the lives of many European citizens for the better. However, looking closely to the EU statistics, we still see significant differences between male and female unemployment. In addition to gender differences unemployment, a new term has been introduced: that of people being ""inactive"", i.e. neither employed nor unemployed and sitting at home. Moreover; employment has always been a problem for disabled people. Disabled people face a lot of unusual obstacles and barriers in getting a job or building their own business. Under these conditions it is important that to provide physically disabled people with the same level individual choices opportunities and control in their daily lives as non-disabled people for contemporary societies.Based on this phenomena, the concrete aim of this project is “to train inactive women as e-mentors and consequently support micro-entrepreneurship of women with physical disabilities by means of e-mentoring, so that they can work from their home”.These inactive women have probably worked before and know working life, most of them were successful entrepreneurs and would like to offer their knowledge but on home based basis since they cannot leave home due to several reasons. Knowing the fact that the ""home based working"" is one of the best working models for people with physical disabilities in general, it was also mentioned that almost half of non working persons with physical disabilities need some form of assistance to work throughout the EU.For this purpose and realising the philosophy, ID-Women idea brings together many different professionalism together for reaching to project aim. Wold of work, company, AVT, University, NGOs and Research&Development organisations came together for the implementation of this project. Some partners have been invited from mentioned former projects and some of them have not been participated above ones but similar other projects:POINT [TR], coordinator who is professional in ICT and project development field, also promoted above subject projects has born all management and technical infrastructure development; apart from being the previous VOCA and IT&E projects' coordinator, COOP [SK], experienced VET institution and in AVT; supported the project from pedagogical dimension; PENTHESILEIA [EL], is a Women NGO and growing steadily in Greek social environment and was created in order to offer services in women and other vulnerable groups that experience social racism of any type. GAZI [TR], one of the biggest universities in Turkey who supported the project from learning material development point of view as well as reaching their network members. ZARIF [SK], a women NGO bearing many members from various disciplines. They primarily contacted women e-mentors to be trained via ID-Women and also reach nearby countries such as Czech Republic, Poland and Austria. IFI [ES], is a reputable AVT and VET organisation also very experienced in EU projects. TAKIDD [TR], is a women NGO concentrating in women development and employability also having former EU project experiences. ITeE-PIB [PL], large research center supported ID-Women for developing its new innovative tools. As they are extremely experienced in EU project development and execution, project utilized their non-stereotype approaches in developing its own tools to reach to project aims.This partnership has been formed to develop e-learning platform with enhanced e-learning material inserted. To develop the model to improve the employability of inactive women and women with physical disabilities, which will also be a model for other similar activity fields than e-mentoring, in next years. This created ID-Women model will also improve the output quality in the sector by means of increasing the opportunities of supply and demand meeting and resulting increase in competition.This approach has been designed and implemented in parallel to Europe 2020 main strategy, which has main strategy to become a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy to achieve high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion. Concretely, all ambitious objectives of the programme were set. Please visit www.id-women.net and become a member for detailed information."

"The aim of the project ip4women is to improve gender balance and reduce the gender gap in patenting of inventions. Statistics show a gender gap in patent applications between female and male patent applicants. This highlights a contradiction since the people within academic and scientist area are almost equal from gender point of view, especially Ph.D. owners level and this equality should be reflected in patent applications.The project consortium approached this challenge by introducing a web based platform with patent e-mentoring concept training both mentors and mentees. Female inventors were e-trained and/or e-mentored to increase their abilities and potential of applying patent applications and the platform supplies also more enhanced initial and continuous training for those who would want to be a patent e-mentors for women in work- based environment. The project started with performing a user need study in order to provide a platform with content adapted to the target group. The platform with it’s content was presented in several workshops and continuously improved. The aim was to take the leap from mentoring to e-mentoring and trigger the users to digest the content by providing content in a text format adapted for reading online and additionally adding avatar for only listening to the content. The ip4women project is now offering several results contained in the platform and Erasmus+ Projects' Results platform as appropriate:- IPR & patenting practical multi-level e-learning ""content need"" analysis, via surveys through the aid of partner women NGOs in all project countries,- Multi-level IPR & patenting e-learning and e-guiding platform for e-Mentors as well as future patent applicants,- Online feedback system within the portal, model description report,- Testing report of the whole system, including mentor-mentee relations, individual information seekers responses, e-guiding performance by using above mentioned intelligent and interactive feedback toolkit. Whole system has been optimized by the use of these tools and aimed continuously to be improved by feedback of volunteer e-mentors for better sustainability of the complete ip4women system.The partnership was combined in order to been established to be able to realise all this ip4women environment as:- Uppdragshuset [SE] - IPR and patent specialist SME and R/D performer, expert in Mentoring,- MINERVA [SE], ZARIF[SK], TAKIDD [TR], FPK [PL] - Women NGOs having direct access to target group from different scientific backgrounds, various expertises,- POINT [TR] - R/D performing SME expert in Mentoring, development of e-Learning infrastructures,- ITeE-PIB [PL] - R/D in VET having also various patent applicant practices,- MOJMIR [SK] - VET and entrepreneurship training."

"Literacy is fundamental to human development as it enables people to live full lives and contribute to their communities and societies. The basic literacy skills landscape of EU citizen and not only is very gloomy now a days, although in some countries the official data about this issues are missing, there are a lot of signals that the situation is critical. Literacy is also an essential prerequisite for all kinds of learning. In the knowledge-based societies of the 21st century, with the rapid spread of new technologies and a constantly changing work environment, education is no longer limited to childhood and adolescence but instead should be conceptualized as lifelong and life-wide.In Europe, one in five 16-65 year-olds have poor reading skills and it is estimated that around 55 million adults between 15 and 65 years of age have literacy difficulties (World Literacy Foundation, 2015). European males have a slightly higher literacy level compared to European females (OECD, PIAAC). According to PIAAC data, among EU countries, Austria registers the highest gender gap with respect to literacy difficulties.In Romania, according to the latest official census data (2011), 1.4% from total population have no education/no basic literacy skills (read and write), while the percentage of illiterates by gender indicates that the problem is more critical among women: 1% men and 1.7% women. The number of illiterate women (around 160.000) is twice the number of illiterate men in Romania (80.000). By ethnicity, 1% of Romanians, 14.1% of Roma, 11.1% of Turkish have no basic literacy skills. Data broken down by gender and ethnicity show that women from ethnic minority groups register the highest rate of illiteracy. Thus, 0.6% of Romanian men, 1.4% of Romanian women; 11.3% of Roma men and 17% of Roma women; 8% of Turkish men and 14.8% of Turkish women have no basic literacy skills.Also, other European countries face significant rates of illiteracy among adults such as Turkey (4.4%) and Spain (1.7%) (UNDP). According to UNESCO data, in 2016, Turkey registered almost 2 million illiterate women and around 350.000 illiterate men. In Spain the number of illiterate women is around 460.000, while the number of illiterate man is 220.000.People with literacy difficulties feel ashamed about their shortcomings, hide it, believe they are too old to learn, and either consider improvement impossible or are afraid of failing (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2011). People with literacy difficulties are more likely to suffer from unemployment, poor health and poverty. Literacy difficulties cost the the EU economy over 350 billion euros each year (World Literacy Foundation, 2015).I-Read project aims to develop and boost basic literacy skills of adults, targeting low educated women. Specific objectives are: addressing the most common needs of women with no basic literacy skills for improving their social integration and life chances; developing and transferring an innovative tool for basic literacy skills to organizations and NGOs that support skills development among low-educated women, supporting the activity of NGOs for women that are active at local level, rural areas and among disadvantaged groups.I-Read project will involve as participants: 100 from target groups (60 ILLITERATE WOMEN, from disadvantaged groups such as Roma, migrants; and 40 MENTORS who will support illiterate women to achieve basic literacy) and 20 experts in adult education, IT application for learning/training, mentoring. i-Read project will develop 2 INTELLECTUAL OUTPUTS:-Learnable Reading Tool - LRT an innovative approach for teaching reading skills , for those who will learn ""basic literacy"" via smart phones, only watching and listening avatars and learning alphabet and 25-50 basic phrases for daily life;The most important function of i-Read tool will be that, it will allow the illiterate women to become literate women on their own - only by receiving support from close mentors (e.g. daughters) - overcoming the ""embarrassment"" obstacle which usually prevents them from attending conventional literacy training classes. The tool addresses women who are living in remote areas of the country with mobility restrictions, including disabilities. Thus, i-Read's LRT will definitely remove all possible barriers which may hold back the illiterate women from becoming literate women!-Handbook for mentors, for those who will assist literacy learners (who may be family members, friends) and who can read/write; and are willing to help the learner;The results will be promoted via 4 MULTIPLAYER EVENTS, National Workshops ""Basic literacy for women"".The direct impact of project will consist in reducing the number of illiterate women in communities with risk of marginalization, while the spillover effects resulting from the good example of results achieved by participants that will raise the number of literate women in closed communities."