The OECD LEED (Local Economic and Employment Development Programme) Programme and the European Commission will be hosting a capacity building seminar titled “Building enabling ecosystems for social enterprises” in Brussels on 17-18 February, 2016.
The seminar follows two objectives:
- Fostering international exchange of information on the most successful programmes and policies supporting the establishment of effective ecosystems for social enterprises across the European Union;
- Providing a platform for discussions among actors from different countries and with different roles and perspectives.
Invited participants are stakeholders who are concerned with building conducive ecosystems for social enterprises; policy makers and administrators, networks of social enterprises, social finance investors. The EMES network will be represented by Managing Director Rocío Nogales who will explain why visibility has been identified as one of the three key action areas within the Social Business Initiative and how this feeds into issues of identity and recognition of the social enterprise community. Based on the central role of visibility for social enterprises, Rocío will share some ideas on how visibility and recognition tools could promote access to markets and finance for social enterprises, underlined by concrete examples.
This agenda of the event is available here and it makes part of a European Commission and OECD LEED Capacity Building Seminar Series. According to Antonella Noya, OECD Senior Policy Analyst, “capacity building seminars are in ideal format for sharing international knowledge. Bringing together representatives of governments, actors, academia, and other stakeholders, they help to spark animated discussions and create a fertile ground for generating and sharing ideas. At the same time, drawing on actual case studies makes these conversations concrete and applicable to the situation actors on the ground are facing, so that policies and practices are better aligned. Based on our experience, we are confident that there will be many fruitful discussions around key elements of the ecosystem for social enterprise development, including access to market, access to finance, legal frameworks and recognition and visibility strategies”.
OECD LEED focuses on how public policy can create jobs through self-employment and entrepreneurship and provide better access to the labour market for economically and socially disadvantaged and under-represented groups. Read more about the extensive programme and its activities here.