Professional qualification and entrepreneurial spirit are important factors in creating attractive jobs in the Danube region. Digitisation offers a particularly great potential for this.

The project “Qualifying women for digitisation in the Danube region” lead by the Stuttgart section of Business and Professional Women wants to support this potential. It is supported by the Baden-Württemberg Foundation as part of its programme Danube Perspective: Education, Culture and Civil Society. Over a period of two years, the qualification project aims to support working women in the Danube region in building up their skills in digitisation.

Two groups previously excluded from participation in digitisation will be addressed in particular: On the one hand, the project is aimed at small and micro entrepreneurs. For these women, training to shape digitisation offers new opportunities to become economically active supra-regionally in the Danube region. On the other hand, salaried women are addressed. In the project, they can expand their digital knowledge in order to better position themselves for work 4.0.

The project will be piloted in Budapest (Hungary) and Pula (Croatia). First, the women there will be informed about the new qualification possibilities through events and social media. In the following qualification phase, mentoring and web-based training will be carried out. In addition, a total of 4 workshops will be offered in which participants will test practical tips and application examples on how to use social media for business activities, how to run online shops or how to develop innovative business models. A total of 500 disseminators are to be trained in this way.

The continuous development of the digital platform “Danube Dialogue” is central to this process. This platform serves to network the working groups during the duration of the project and enables women to exchange information and experience on a long-term basis after the end of the project.

International exchange within the project is ensured: One or two events per year at the locations Stuttgart, Ulm, Mannheim and in Budapest and Pula additionally flank the project.

In addition, the project is anchored in other Business and Professional Women Clubs and various women’s networks in participating countries, thus ensuring that it will continue.

Within two years, the participating women from the Danube region have qualified for the use of digitisation in their self-employed and salaried activities. The gain in competence gives the women the opportunity to assert themselves safely and successfully in the labour market that is changing as a result of digitisation and to exploit this potential.