The project is funded by the European Commission under the Grant Scheme “Fostering social inclusion and employment on Local level” EuropeAid/136315/ID/ACT/MK within the Operational Programme for Human Resources Development 2007-2013 (IPA Component IV), and has a duration of 1 year starting 28.12.2016 and will be completed by 12.27.2017. The project is implemented by two NGOs: The National Center for Development of Innovation and Entrepreneurial Learning, Macedonia as a project coordinator and YouNet from Italy.

The main objective of the project is to promote the social inclusion of young Roma through trainings for social Youth Entrepreneurship. The project aims to enable Roma and NEETs (Not in employment, education or training) to participate actively in social life and to create an environment for further development of youth social entrepreneurship in Macedonia.

Specific objectives are:

• To provide special designed training for entrepreneurial skills and social entrepreneurship development for Roma and NEET’s in order to develop, validate and implement social entrepreneurial projects;
• To establish Social Entrepreneurship hubs in two cities: Skopje and Shtip for supporting young entrepreneurs with focus to the Roma minority in business development, fundraising activities, sharing best practices, good examples and failures, as well as collaboration with stakeholders from national and local administrations responsible for entrepreneurship, employment, education and minorities;
• To organise social entrepreneurship competition where the participants will apply their knowledge from the trainings in practice throughout their ideas;
• To ensure that the Social Entrepreneurship hubs will deliver of further support to the disadvantaged groups of youths (Roma and other NEETs) in order to increase their employability;
• To ensure support of development of self-employment opportunities for Roma and facilitating moving from employment in the informal economy to working in the “white” economy;
• To start an awareness raising campaign for social entrepreneurship and Roma integration trough social entrepreneurship that will promote solidarity, tolerance and foster mutual understanding between cultures;
• To engage key stakeholders in Macedonia for supporting for Roma and NEET’s in their social entrepreneurship business and long-term support of the Social Entrepreneurship hubs.

As part of the project objectives trainings for 30 Roma and NEET’s will be organized in Skopje on 15^th, 18^th and 19^th of September 2017. The trainings improve soft skills, entrepreneurial knowledge with focus on social entrepreneurship and also improve ICT skills (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). The trainings will be held in three consecutive days. The first day the focus will be on the project itself and development of business model. The second day the topic will be entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial competences and there will be practical exercise in the business model Canvas. The third and final day will be about ICT skills with focus on Word, Excel and PowerPoint, where the participants will get familiar with the basic tools of these software programs.