WEED - Women, Enterprise and Employment in Local Development

Celje, Lead Partner of the WEED project, is Slovenia´s third largest city, with a population slightly over 48 000 inhabitants. It is located in the Lower Styrjia region, in the North-East of the country. Celje depends quite heavily on the industrial sector, as 68% of its active population is employed by local industries. Its socio-economic situation has greatly improved in the recent period: the unemployment rate has indeed been reduced from 20% to 11% over the past 6 years. Yet, such an improvement has not had sufficient impact on certain segments of the population, such as women. Celje women indeed much more affected than men by unemployment, as well as part-time jobs and lower pays. In order to address such urgent matters, the city of Celje has decided to take the lead of an URBACT thematic network dedicated to “Women, Enterprise, Employment in local Development” (WEED): it hopes to gain from the network’s activities examples of tools and good practices available in other European cities, especially pertaining to the women’s entrepreneurial capacity.

Gil Scott is an Emeritus professor of Social Inclusion and Equalities at the Glasgow Caledonian University as well as honorary director at the Scottish Poverty Information Unit. For over thirty years she has been involved in research and policy development in the area of urban regeneration and equalities and her experience in advising community projects and government policy has given her a strong basis in which to help this network.

The WEED project combines two areas of interest for Gill: gender equality and urban regeneration. Unfortunately, it is quite common that on a local level the agenda for urban regeneration does not consider an equalities agenda and vice versa. This project provides the opportunity to integrate these very two important issues within the EU context.

Promoting gender equality has been central to European policy and legislation for at least four decades: it is one of the defining features of the EU commitment to cohesion and integration and policy has been much refined during that time. As concerns urban regeneration, there have been policies aimed at addressing the issue of poverty but so far there has been a lack of policies directed towards the issue of women as a potential force for change in urban development.