AURORA-LEONARDO DA VINCI PROJECT: the last meeting in Ankara

di Giacomo Paoloni

The 6th of six meetings to promote this thought-stimulating project named Aurora project took place in Ankara. AgoraVox participated to the project, providing its social network and internet news’ based platform to a wider program aiming at circulating new ideas to tackle unemployment in the European Union and to develop links with EU bordering countries, mainly Turkey, and help them improve education-business relations. The delegate Sirio Zolea and I, the learner Giacomo Paoloni, represented AgoraVox in this last session of meetings.

Out of the 22 applicants, the Da Vinci Project sees the participation of 7 partners representing 7 different countries: French online magazine AgoraVox; Turkish Gazi Vocational High School and University; Maltese no-profit think-tank Foster Project; Swedish think-tank Globulen; Belgium’s Nieuwe Media School; Spanish solar energy firm ISES; Polish independent commercial strategy advisor Core SP (which could not attend the meetings); and finally, German non-profit educational Wisamar Institute.

Before delineating the events, I would personally like to thank our wonderful hosts from Ankara’s Gazi University and from Gazi Vocational High School for an amazing time and for how they arranged these two days. The first session, at Ankara’s Elite Palas Hotel, started with a well-prepared presentation of the EU Network Employment on Youth, a program aimed at reducing unemployment in EU countries through a system of traineeships reaching out those who quit studies after secondary education.

The elephant in the room, i.e. medium and small-sized businesses, was dealt with in the following two presentations: there, our partners from Gazi Vocational High School and University gave us an overview of how such initiatives to tackle unemployment could serve the wider goal of launching small and medium-sized enterprises and make them competitive. As an effective example of such policies, our Turkish hosts of Gazi Universitesi brought us in visit to OSTIM, an industrial citadel in the outskirts of Ankara which started in 1968 with few and now can count on the biggest industrial complex of Continental Europe. During this visit, we were able to meet the two chairmen from TurkMark, a medium-sized business created by two former Gazi Universitesi engineering students. This business amounts to a perfect example to show the benefits of Education on entrepreneurship: the firm started off a s a simple consultancy business and now can count on a three-storey factory that enjoys contracts with Turkish Army and Military engineering-leading businesses such as Lockheed Martin.

The morning following this intense day was characterized by the discussion of the final report of the project.