Entrepreneurship has been identified as a new opportunity for women to deliver alternative services to broaden and diversify the scope of their activities, and their role in society with effect on social inclusion, poverty and economic development in rural areas.

Women have a specific role in the development of multifunctional farming activities, along with the modernisation of rural areas. This pushes women into a peripheral position in farm management, paving the way for integrated new business activities. Whilst underlining the importance of farming and its contributions to rural areas, multifunctional farming is a sector that offers opportunities for integrating heritage values into strategies for economic and social sustainability of rural areas.

Raising Employability of Women through entrepreneurial Activities fostering Rural Development (REWARD), is an EU funded Erasmus+ project that began in November 2018. The project will analyse the situation of rural women in Europe, and create training materials in order to provide them with the tools to manage a wide range of multifunctional activities that relate to agriculture and rural cultural heritage.

The kick off meeting took place in Paris at the headquarters of the Project Co-ordinator, along with partners from Spain, Czech Republic, Poland and Slovenia. It was an opportunity to discuss the aims and objectives of the project.

For the initial analysis, partners prepared a presentation on the situation of rural women in their country, as well as at the European level. The information was gathered by COAG Jaén to feed the Summary Report.

Partners were then tasked with writing a State-of-the-Art Reports in each of their countries.

The next meeting will be held in Slovenia in the autumn 2019.