By Christina Achilleos, VET Trainer in Entrepreneurship and Partner Representative for InnoEUsphere in the Green New Home Erasmus+ project
The European Union is pursuing two transitions at once. A green transition that reshapes how we produce, consume, and live, and a social transition that demands the genuine inclusion of people who have been pushed to the margins of our labour markets. These two agendas are too often discussed in separate rooms. The Green New Home project (GNH), in which InnoEUsphere is proud to participate alongside Internationaler Bund (coordinator), Danmar Computers, KAINOTOMIA, LAND Impresa Sociale, and SUSIC, brings them into the same conversation. Not as a feel-good gesture, but because the evidence strongly supports it.
As a VET trainer who has spent years working with adult learners on entrepreneurship, I have seen again and again that people who have crossed borders arrive with something most training programmes struggle to teach: resilience, adaptability, and practical knowledge of how to start over with limited resources. In many of our learners’ countries of origin, circular practices, resource stewardship, food preservation, repair economies, and community-based financing models are not trendy concepts. They are daily life. Europe’s green economy stands to gain enormously from this tacit knowledge, provided we create the conditions for it to be surfaced, validated, and scaled.
The green sector is where jobs are growing. It is also where policy, public investment, and private capital are converging. For a migrant learner considering self-employment, green entrepreneurship offers three advantages that few other pathways can match. Demand that is structurally increasing. A sector still young enough to welcome new entrants without decades of gatekeeping. And alignment with EU funding priorities across the European Green Deal, the New European Bauhaus, and the Pact for Skills.
At the same time, migrants remain underrepresented in green sectors and in entrepreneurship more broadly. Without deliberate intervention, the green transition will reproduce the same exclusions we already see in the wider labour market. Targeted, high-quality training is the lever that changes this, and VET is where that lever sits.
Effective green entrepreneurship training for migrants is not a translated version of a mainstream business course. It is designed from the ground up around three principles.
First, recognition of prior learning and lived experience. Many of our learners already know how to run informal enterprises, how to operate on thin margins, and how to build trust-based networks across language barriers. Training should build on these strengths, not overwrite them.
Second, competences that are both sustainable and marketable. Through GNH, our partnership is developing a competence framework grounded in a three-stage research process, ensuring that what we teach reflects real labour market demand rather than assumptions about it.
Third, tools that learners can actually use in the fragments of time they can spare. The GNH Assessment and Training Space lets learners evaluate their own skills and progress at their own pace. The Strategy Maker mobile app walks them step by step through building a concrete green business strategy, on the device they already carry. These are the kinds of tools that meet people where they are, not where institutional convenience would prefer them to be.
The case for training migrants in green entrepreneurship is not charitable. It is strategic. Europe needs green founders. Migrants bring talent, perspective, and drive. VET providers and adult education organisations, working inside well-designed transnational partnerships like GNH, are the connective tissue that turns potential into enterprise.
At InnoEUsphere, our SME, active in education, culture, and capacity building, we consider this one of the most practical contributions we can make to both the green and the inclusion agendas at once. Green New Home is showing, month by month, what that contribution looks like in practice.
Green New Home (2024-1-DE02-KA220-ADU-000244995) is co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ Programme, KA220-ADU, and runs from November 2024 to October 2026.