UNIT 5
Intercultural Barriers to Access Market, Learning from the Hosting Culture and How to Adapt ItIntroduction
The female migrants following the Kaleidoscope training, have received an extensive training regarding their soft skills on action learning and coaching, daily problem solving, network and communication, creativity in developing a business model and resilience in entrepreneurship. In this module migrant women will be given the opportunity to reflect and develop their competences regarding the intercultural barriers to access market, learning from the hosting culture and how to adapt it. For Kaleidoscope project a desk research has been conducted showing the intercultural barriers that women entrepreneurs face. I t has been shown that the problems that migrant entrepreneurs are facing are quite similar in nature to those that all entrepreneurs are facing, however migrants face problems and business barriers on average more than the native population. The most distinctive features are language barriers, financial limitations, discrimination and double discrimination for women entrepreneurs.
Challenges related to professional life include proceedings such as familiarization of oneself with the labour culture and laws of the new country, gaining a work and resident permit, a valid passport or national identity card and complying with employment laws and regulations. Sometimes even highly qualified people are not able to find or create a secure job for long periods. That might influence their general well-being. There is strong evidence that create a professional path leads to improved self-esteem, improved general and mental health, and reduced psychological risks.
This module has been planned to give the participants an active role. There have been designed two main activities, with one icebreaker for every activity. The participants will use material and they will be mostly engaged in a process reforming their representations. Additionally, they will be engaged in nonverbal corporal expression using the technic of Theatre Forum (Augusto Boal).