Empowered Women - active on the labour market

Amica Educa is a non-partisan, non-governmental, non-profit organization that through its activities on the territory of B&H and Southeastern Europe contributes to the quality of life and community by applying the concept of lifelong learning, alternative and traditional approaches to psycho-social work with youth and adults, striving for European integration.

Based on the common objectives of work and orientation to the same categories of the population, DVV International - Country Office Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2017 supported the project of the organization, which is called "Empowered Women – active on the labour market".

Referring to Amica Educa's previous experience in implementing projects with long-term unemployed women aged 30-60 years, one can conclude that:

• Women begin actively looking for a job immediately after completion of education. They are mostly unable to find employment due to lack of job opportunities, but also because employers don't want to hire young women who can plan their families or use maternity leave.
• After forming a family (marriage and birth of a child) women stop to seek work actively and within 10 years after the end of education are completely inactive on the labour market.
• Women have lack of self-confidence to develop their business ideas because of traditional gender roles and fosterage.

Because of that Amica Educa has created a project that, besides digital literacy and psycho education, also includes organization of business skills training which will empower unemployed women to actively seek job and to develop their own business plans.

Project „Empowered Women – active on the labour market“ consisted of three main activities:

• implementation of a training “Digital literacy”,
• implementation of a psycho education “Personal skills”,
• implementation of a business education “Business skills”.

Twelve long-term unemployed women from different backgrounds, different level of education, and coming from different parts of Tuzla Canton attended 12 workshops of Personal Skills, 12 workshops of Business Skills and 12 Digital Literacy trainings. Eleven out of twelve completed in total 72 hours of various educations over a 6 month period.

Participants: 24 long-term unemployed women, aged 30-45 years, registered in the Office for employment Tuzla Canton (DVV International supported one group of 12 participants)

Duration: 12 months (2 groups of 12 participants)

Project goals:

• to reduce the number of unemployed women in order to improve gender equality in Bosnia and Herzegovina through the inclusion of women in the process of lifelong learning and active participation in the highly computerized society,
• to increase the competitiveness of women on the labour market and their opportunities for self-employment.