);

The eNEET Rural project addresses the challenges of the youth population living in rural areas of the target countries and struggling to find suitable job. The target group is split to two groups: one with secondary school graduation and interest in entrepreneurship, the other without secondary school graduation seeking trainings to get skilled job. During last two years, the transnational partners tried to support significant number of NEETs by offering them a set of toolkit including online and offline trainings, Start-up competition, staff exchange, coaching and mentoring services for NEETs living in rural areas to help the chances of their employability in agricultural segment either as skilled employee or entrepreneur.

Despite the covid-pandemic, the project consortium is very close to reach the target NEETs involved in our training, entrepreneurship and mentoring activities. Up to now, we have the number of 1.280 NEETs from Bulgaria, Romania, Spain, Italy, Hungary and Slovenia, participated in the organized series of Soft-skills and Agro-professional trainings (on-the-spot/webinars/online). Elaborated in order to support NEETs living in rural areas into expanding their competences, acquiring knowledge and enhancing their skills, the trainings and the quality of training materials are rated very highly by NEETs. The content of the training materials is easy for understanding and user-friendly. We also received a positive feedback on the training materials from our trainers, lectors, mentors.

More than 40 national stakeholders, incl. public institutions, rural municipalities, local unemployment associations, universities, agro-holdings, etc. supported the project activities, such as enrollment of NEETs for “Soft-skills” and “Agro-professional” trainings on national level, promoting the ICT platform and the possibilities for e-learning. Regarding the start-up competition, in the selection phase 54 NEETs developed ideas for start-up businesses. We have selected 3 business plans per partner and we are mentoring them until the competition will take place in Budapest. The winners of the start-up will attend the 3-5 days transnational apprenticeship actions, planned in Romania. 12 national stakeholders participated in the study visits and 13 NEETs in brokerage event, 8 NEETs were enrolled in apprenticeships at farms. Thanks to these actions up to now the project contributed to the creation of more than 30 new jobs and 775 NEETs engaged in active job search.

All partners constantly organized personal meetings and attended many relevant events in order to connect and to involve stakeholders for the project purposes. Some of the most important events visited by partners up to now are: Famers’ day in Szentlorinc and Organic farming conference in Kecskemet in Hungary, INDAGRA fair and the International Business Forum – IBF, addressed to entrepreneurs in  Romania, AGRA International Fair of Agriculture and Food in Slovenia, Agricultural Fair “Gonzaga Millennial Fair” in Italy, National Meeting of Farmers and  International Fair Plovdiv – Agra, Vinaria and FoodTech 2020 in Bulgaria, LIAR – Local Innovation Working Group of New Generation Skills in Slovenia.

Based on the eight bilateral cooperation agreements signed between project partners and supporting organizations from Greece, Latvia, Slovakia and Croatia, we hope that the eNEET Rural project will succeed to maximize the transferability of results achieved to other regions and to other communities of actors and target groups than those involved in the project itself.