Accelerating Women’s Enterprise Legacy Toolkit

The Accelerating Women’s Enterprise Legacy Toolkit is full of resources to help anyone with an interest in helping women start businesses, or indeed women themselves who want to develop their business skills.

The AWE programme planned to come to an end in January 2022, but was extended to the end of March 2023. The programme was delivered by a consortium of partners in the UK and France. It was supported by the Interreg France (Channel) England Programme and aimed to address economic and social issues in regions on either side the Channel.

The original project provided the following support:

  • Over 50 hours of new learning content to help female entrepreneurs start a business
  • trained 600 women entrepreneurs using the resources in this toolkit, with over 120 starting a business
  • recruited and trained more than 200 mentors, using the mentor programme documentation in this toolkit
  • conduct new research on women’s entrepreneurship- the reports are included in the toolkit

During the extension, work continued to increase the number of women trained to over 900 and the number of jobs created to over 100. The number of mentors trained aimed to increase to over 240 and the matches between mentor and mentee to 230.

Partners also developed peer to peer networking for the female entrepreneurs who graduated from the original AWE programme with the reach widened both geographically and demographically to include new areas, more women from ethnic ministry backgrounds and younger female entrepreneurs. New training materials were developed including a digital marketing bootcamp.

New research was also conducted on the impact of the AWE programme in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic explained through a Podcast series which can be viewed via the Legacy Toolkit.

Through this collaborative, cross-border approach, AWE has improved the quality and effectiveness of support to socially or economically disadvantaged and under-represented groups and worked to address the gender imbalance in entrepreneurship.

What is the AWE Legacy Toolkit?

The AWE Legacy Toolkit is a collection of resources created during the lifetime of the programme to support women in their business start-up journey.

For female entrepreneurs, the parts of the toolkit that will be of most use are the online e-learning modules that help you work through topics such as finance and marketing to help you get your business off the ground and keep it growing.  The modules are completely free to access, and all we ask is for you to complete a short form with your details.

For organisations and other individuals wanting to access the Face-to-Face workshop material and the Mentoring Programme Resources we will require you to provide some details of who you are and your intentions for use of the toolkit, and sign-up under a Creative Commons Licence for their use. On the successful review of your submission, we will then provide you with login details.

The toolkit also includes our Research Reports and Key Learnings of the Programme, which are available to anyone to download plus the Podcast series created to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on female entrepreneurs.

What is contained in the AWE Legacy Toolkit?

To view the resources available in the AWE Legacy Toolkit, click on the button below – this will also provide you with a link to the short form to complete for access to the resources.

Click below to view the contents of the Legacy Toolkit and gain access.