The motto “Work and Education First” is extremely relevant to the objectives of the Igma-Femina project.
The number of refugees claiming asylum in the EU has rapidly increased and more than 55% are from women and children. At the same time, migrant female unemployment and social exclusion remains one of the main socioeconomic challenges for many European countries.
Moreover, a number of indicators, such as educational background, prior work experience, social status and, personal situation, create a significant variation in employment patterns among European Union member states. According to the Rand Corporation report, “Migrant Women in the European Labour Force”, female immigrants tend to run a higher risk of unemployment or underemployment (part-time and temporary employment).
All member States tend to lack gender-sensitive education and employment services, turning a blind eye to the needs of women, which leads to intersectional discrimination based on gender and ethnicity identity (European Parliament, 20150000INI).
There are three actions needed to improve the access of migrants and refugee women to the labour markets and education:
- Sufficient career counselling through training of professionals
- An efficient gender-sensitive strategy for cooperation within local stakeholder networks, dealing with validation, training and job placement to provide services based upon individual needs and the barriers of every woman
- Active involvement of employers in the local stakeholder networks as a key to education and work transition.
The above challenges lead to the Igma-Femina project!
Igma-Femina is a 3-year ERASMUS+ project, which is coordinated by FOLKUNIVERSITETET Uppsala (Sweden) with the participation of partner organizations from five (5) European Countries: Greece, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Ukraine.
The project aims at improving the accessibility of migrant/refugee women to adult education and gender-sensitive counselling in order to enter the labour market