The ETF’s enterprise team starts 2012 with a new work programme packed with activities spanning all ETF partner regions and culminating in a high-level corporate meeting during Global Entrepreneurship Week. The nucleus of the team’s work will be a concerted drive to establish a more systematic approach for the identification, quality assurance and dissemination of good practice.

‘We intend to examine the real value of good practice in the areas of entrepreneurship and enterprise skills,’ says ETF’s Anthony Gribben. ‘For the most part good practice is subjectively defined and if it is to have real learning value some kind of quality assurance needs to be brought into the process. We therefore intend to road-test a good practice peer review mechanism,’ he adds. Three areas have been selected to test the peer review model, a) training for youth start-ups, b) female entrepreneurship and c) skills for growth enterprises.

Good practices in all areas are presently being sought from within the European Union and ETF partner countries and which could feature in the road-testing phase.* The outcomes of the project will be shared into an international meeting to be held 14-15 November in Brussels as part of ETF’s activity plan for Global Entrepreneurship Week.

Secondly, the team will kick-off a series of human capital assessments in the EU’s Mediterranean neighbourhood as part of a wider review of enterprise policy associated with the Euro-Mediterranean Charter for Enterprise. ‘This assessment drive will allow us to determine progress in each country since our last assessment in 2008,’ says Aziz Jaouani, who leads the activities in the region. ’The assessment will be preceded, in June 2012, by a regional capacity-building seminar to prepare the stakeholders from partner countries for the assessment exercise,’ adds Jaouani.

Meanwhile, the team will finalise the SBA assessments in the pre-accession and Eastern Partnership regions. This follows an in depth analysis of policy developments in some 14 countries undertaken in the latter half of 2011 in the areas of entrepreneurial learning and enterprise skills. The ETF assessments will feature within reports to be published by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry later in the year. Referring particularly to the SBA assessment in the Eastern Neighbourhood, Olena Bekh who coordinated the assessment says, ‘it has been an amazing challenge and an excellent learning opportunity for ETF to work so closely with our partner countries on the SBA assessment. We appreciate very much the interest and readiness of all stakeholders to engage in the process,’ she says.

Other activities of the team include support to the European Commission on teacher training for entrepreneurship where a number of partner countries will join peers from the EU in determining how teachers should be supported for the entrepreneurial learning agenda. ETF will additionally lead a EU27 working group on developing learning outcomes for each level of the education system. This forms part of a wider development drive on entrepreneurship education taken by the Commission’s education directorate.

The team’s 2012 work programme also includes customised policy support to a number of partner countries including Bosnia and Herzegovina, Moldova and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. ‘Our Palestinian partners are particularly keen to bring forward developments on teacher training for entrepreneurship,’ says Denise Loughran, ‘Our plans are to borrow on expertise from our partner institution SEECEL and its school network for the Palestinian project,’ adds Loughran.

* Expressions of interest for being considered for inclusion in the best practice developments should be addressed to Anthony Gribben.

For more information on regional specific activities, contact:
Denise Loughran, Pre-accession Region,
Aziz Jaouani, Southern Neighbourhood,
Olena Bekh,  Eastern Neighbourhood Region.