The Women Get Back

The European Commission (2015) in its recently published “Strategic Engagement for Gender Equality 2016-19” has expressed its priority to keep pursuing gender equality, increasing female labour market participation and the equal economic independence between women and men and reducing the gender pay, earnings and pension gap, thus fighting women poverty. On the other side, Latin American women are engaging in what was previously considered “men’s work.” However, nearly 30% of young women in Latin America become mothers before 20 years of age and the majority of them are socioeconomically underprivileged, which fosters the intergenerational reproduction of poverty, hinders women’s autonomy and their life projects, according to a new report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, 2014). Consequently, they have difficulties in gaining access to a profession or recovering the same after the maternity.The overall objective of the project is to transfer to youth workers innovative training methodologies for young women with fewer opportunities in EU and Latin America and create a positive impact and an increased autonomy over their social and economic lives. The project aims at fostering the use of ICT and wishes to encourage the use of these tools applied to this target group to improve the quality of learning, provide access to unknown online resources, providing feedback on progress and create the conditions for increasing skills and self‐esteem of women in situations of crisis and with difficulties in gaining access to a profession. Youth workers will learn through non-formal learning methods how to plan and implement new and innovative trainings, relational support meetings, workshops and leisure time activities for young women with fewer opportunities. This project will develop youth workers' set of technical, transversal and intercultural skills and competences and indirectly may open for the young women of partners’ local community new job opportunities, insert them in the labour market and improve their employability.The “Women Get Back” (WGB) project plans to build the capacity of 10 youth organizations through a series of inclusive mobility initiatives (training course, job shadowing and youth exchange) aimed to develop experiential and non-formal learning methods of work with marginalized youth. This project will contribute to the implementation of “Europe 2020” strategy, working specifically in the fight against poverty and social exclusion of youth. Project partners will collaboratively prepare a capacity building programme which will be passed on to other youth workers in their countries to increase their organizations social impact and visibility. WGB aims to promote peer learning between youth workers of different continents based on creativity, active participation and intercultural learning.