Entrepreneurship

Building effective impact-driven entrepreneurship education

for young children

15 Nov 2022 12:06 | Entrepreneurship

International research project IDEEC will spend the next three years exploring the effects and promotion of impact-driven entrepreneurship education for children between the ages of 9 and 15. Beginning of november, the nine partner organizations from five countries met physically for the first time to discuss future steps. The Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) is leading the project.

How can you effectively teach children about social and sustainable entrepreneurship? How can you support entrepreneurship education providers, teachers and policymakers in doing so? These are key questions in this international collaborative project. IDEEC stands for ‘Impact-Driven Entrepreneurship Education for Children’ and aims to improve and develop education in social and sustainable entrepreneurship in the participating countries.

Guide with building blocks

For that purpose, the researchers are developing a guide with didactic and pedagogical building blocks so that teachers can create a customized program. IDEEC supports entrepreneurship education providers, teachers and policymakers in designing these effective impact-oriented programs for children between the ages 9-15. Among other things, these children learn to develop entrepreneurial solutions to environmental and social issues. "It is wonderful to see that you can already prepare young people for their future by teaching them entrepreneurial skills, teaching them to be curious and enterprising, to face the world from their own strengths. For AUAS, IDEEC is a great international collaboration with universities from four other countries and the Amsterdam partners Fawaka School of Entrepreneurship and Amsterdam Impact," says Ineke Bussemaker, dean of the AUAS Faculty of Business and Economics.

Educational programs on social and sustainable entrepreneurship for children already exist in each of the participating countries, but an international collaboration and structured research was still absent. Within the Netherlands, the AUAS Entrepreneurship Program, in collaboration with Amsterdam Impact, did research on the effects of the programs of Fawaka School of Entrepreneurship. This project was completed in July 2022.

The IDEEC research project is funded by the European Erasmus+ grant program and runs until September 2025.