Research Project

Accelerating Women's Enterprise

Principal Investigator
Dr Caleb Kwong, Dr Juan Carlos Fernandez De Arroyabe Fernandez, Dr Marta Fernandez De Arroyabe Fernandez, Clare Street and David Khayesi
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The Essex Business School is a partner of the Accelerating Women's Enterprise (AWE) project

AWE is supported by the Interreg France (Channel) England Programme, who are contributing €2,641,184.73 of European Regional Development Funds, and which aims to address economic and social issues in regions on either side the Channel.

Through this collaborative, cross-border approach, this project hopes to improve the quality and effectiveness of support to socially or economically disadvantaged and under-represented groups and to address the gender imbalance in entrepreneurship. The project aims to create 35 hours of new learning content and carry out new research into women's enterprise.

The programme results, learning content, research, mentor-bank and resources will all be brought together in a starter kit, which will be freely available to any stakeholder or organisation that wants to improve its services to female entrepreneurs.

Why Essex?

AWE support is being delivered by a consortium of partners in the UK and France. The University of Essex is involved in the organisation of training, as well as conducting research into the challenges and barriers faced by disadvantaged women entrepreneurs. Dr Caleb Kwon, Dr Juan Carlos Fernandez-de-Arroyabe-Fernandez and Dr Marta Fernandez de Arroyabe Arranz from the Essex Business School will be leading a team of Research Assistants in the project.

The AWE goals
  • To train 700 female entrepreneurs.
  • To recruit and train over 160 mentors.
  • To help 134 women to start new businesses.
Student working on computer in library
Learn more about the AWE project

Accelerating Women’s Enterprise (AWE) is a new collaborative project to help women living in some of the regions either side of the English Channel to increase their personal skills and develop their business ideas and knowledge. to learn more about this collaborative and innovative project, please visit the website and join the mailing list.

Visit the website
Get in touch
Accelerating Women's Enterprise UK
Telephone: 08009 174 324
Centre for Research on Entrepreneurship Innovation Management and Internationalisation (REIMI) University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO4 3SQ