The development of a green economy in the Mediterranean area to combat environmental degradation represents a great opportunity for jobs creation, particularly for young graduates and women who are three times less likely to be employed than men. Strengthening eco-innovative entrepreneurship is a recognized solution even though green ventures face a complex set of challenges including limited access to funding, underdeveloped markets and fragmented support from sector stakeholders.
Entrepreneurs admit to being unprepared and poorly supported with regard to access to finance and access to markets. In view of this lack of information, knowledge and skills, a European project has been created: GIMED.
GIMED's main goal is to support entrepreneurs, particularly young and women, to better access to finance and markets in 5 Mediterranean countries: Spain, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, Egypt and Italy. On the ground, the project will train and coach eco-innovators and encourage financiers to invest in the Mediterranean eco-innovation sector.
To this end, 200 coaching sessions on access to finance and markets will be held, 200 capacity building initiatives dedicated to entrepreneurs on eco-design and green business modelling will be organized and 8 sub-grants per countries will be awarded to consolidate the business creation and grow.
GIMED has therefore been promoted to meet these needs and will be implemented by 6 partners, distributed among several countries in the Mediterranean basin:
Agència de Residus de Catalunya-SCP/RAC (Spain) is responsible for the coordination and implementation of the project and will particularly manage the development of the tools for the capacity building workshops, coaching sessions for access to finance and markets.
The project in numbers:
Duration: 36 months
Start date: 01 September 2019
End date: 31 August 2022
Total budget: 2.633.106,29 €
EU contribution: 2.369.106,29€ (90% co-financing to project)
Main source of funding: European Union (ENI CBC Med Programme)
Additional information:
http://www.enicbcmed.eu/projects/gimed
For any queries related to the GIMED project, please contact:
Claudia Pani: cpani@scprac.org
Burcu Tuncer: btuncer@scprac.org