Entrepreneurship in declining rural areas: key learnings
On 29 May 2024, the Policy Learning Platform organised a workshop on 'Entrepreneurship in declining rural areas' in Burgos. Throughout the day, we explored innovative policies, support mechanisms, and success stories aimed at fostering entrepreneurship, particularly among youth and addressing gender imbalances in rural areas experiencing population decline.
What was the workshop about?
Entrepreneurship is an important component of place reinvention and economic diversification strategies designed to stabilise or revert population trends in rural areas experiencing population decline. A twofold objective is pursued: promoting individual entrepreneurial initiatives, and maximising their chances of having a lasting positive effect on local economic prosperity.
Multiple parallel challenges often need to be addressed, e.g. limited local resources, a lack of entrepreneurial traditions, small labour markets and long distances to higher education and professional training institutions. At the same time, these areas often have unique assets such as natural resources, high quality living environments and tightly knit local communities.
To learn more about this topic, explore the conclusions report our experts have prepared for you.
It contains insights related to youth, gender-balanced entrepreneurship and digital opportunities in rural areas, as well as inspiring Interreg Europe good practices and policy recommendations.
Featured projects
Featured good practices
Discover the good practices from Interreg Europe projects that we explored during the workshop.
Youth entrepreneurship
Young Lausitz initiative is a bottom-up grassroots movement of young people from Lausitz, Germany. Their goal is to make their region attractive to young people. They collect ideas from young people and take them to the political level during public discussions in the region. They have launched a “young image” campaign to attract youth to the region and make proud those who are already there.
PIN is a mini-grant (10.000 to 30.000 €) start-up support programme dedicated to youth aged 18-35. What distinguishes PIN is its ongoing, integrated, tailor-made, and grassroots approach to additional side-services: dedicated tutors, professional services, participation to fairs, workshops and networking. The programme has had impressive results: 70% of participants improved their employment status and 57% of NEET youth have become employed.
Female entrepreneurship
The Rural Women Challenge is a national Spanish programme that aims to promote female entrepreneurship in rural areas. It facilitates access to information, advice, mentoring and specific training, helping women create or consolidate their own businesses, while supporting the female business community in rural areas to bridge the gender gap in employment and entrepreneurship. A collaboration with banks to help women access capital is also foreseen, as well as a more ambitious and better integrated support to companies during their first years of existence.
The ACORNS programme has been designed to support early-stage female entrepreneurs living in rural Ireland and runs over six months part-time. Based on the conviction that entrepreneurs learn best from each other, the ACORNS initiative is centred around interactive round table sessions that are facilitated by female entrepreneurs, known as ‘Lead Entrepreneurs’, who have started and successfully grown businesses in rural Ireland. Participants note a reduction in psychological isolation and an increase in confidence and motivation.
Digital opportunities for rural entrepreneurship
Fundão is a small municipality in Portugal that has gone through an impressive transformation since 2012 when their development strategy went through a complete rethinking. Today the city has become an integrated ecosystem for innovation and investments.
It hosts an advanced training centre, a business hub, a Digital Innovation Hub, a Fab Lab, a gaming cluster and many other initiatives aimed at revitalising the town. There is a bootcamp for software development and coding classes are offered in all public schools with AI classes to follow shortly. The municipality has also become known as a testbed for smart and sustainable solutions for agriculture
Go Remote was a pilot project with the goal to improve the quality and quantity of remote job offerings for youth. The initiative used modern ICT tools and platforms for engaging events to provide youth the skills needed for remote working as well as to match them with prospective employers.
Digital solutions like “job tinder” and career speed-dating events were carried out. There are plans to scale the pilot by Visas Iespējas, a Latvian platform for youth opportunities that sees over 15 000 visitors a month.
Presentations
For more information on the good practices, download the presentations bellow.
Further resources
Business incubation: from startup to scaleup
In this policy brief, you'll explore examples from the Interreg Europe community on the diversity of business incubation programmes and recent trends in the area.
Boosting entrepreneurship in rural areas
Boosting entrepreneurship in rural areas opens new opportunities and markets. Rural SMEs show great potential as a source of economic growth and innovation.
Fostering entrepreneurship and business creation
On 14 November 2018, the Policy Learning Platform organised a workshop on fostering entrepreneurship and business creation. Access the key-learnings.
Rethinking local policies: Spaces for entrepreneurship
Explore the key learnings of our workshop on spaces for entrepreneurship that took place in Ghent.
Key learnings of the webinar on Smart Villages
On 28 June 2022, the Policy Learning Platform organised a webinar on the topic of Smart Villages. Learn about the key insights and good practice to turn your village smart!
Webinar recording: Innovation in rural areas
On 15 July 2021, the Policy Learning Platform organised a webinar on rural innovation. Access the recording and presentations and get inspired!
