A social approach to manage international mobility programmes

Resumo

The GreenIT project was awarded within the Erasmus Mundus, Action 2 programme as a mobility scheme for all academiclevels (185 mobilities in total) between 6 European and 4 North African countries. A special feature of GreenIT as aneducational project is that only a subset of academic fields (sciences and technology) were included. Therefore, this projectboosted the engineering studies in a geographical area where other fields, like archeology and humanities, have beenhistorically prioritized.Besides, GreenIT projecthad facedanother extra difficulty: attractingthis collectiveto a traditionalmale sector. This issue was even harder because the initial concerns of North African women to go abroad alone for longperiods of time and for European women to live in North African countries. However, a great success in gender equalitywas achieved with a 40% of female beneficiaries. Finally, this project was totally supported by a social network site for itsmanagement and coordination and, even more important, to provide a social-based platform where applicants andgrantees could share their opinions, recommendations and feelings. This platform played an important role to avoidisolation, facilitate integration of grantees and encourage women to participate in the mobilities.