3rd Best national practice and experience from Greece

General information

 

Name of the good practice:	5000by2020
Name of the organisations or institution in charge:	MeXOXO
City	Athens
Country	Greece
1st project year	2015
Is the project ongoing? (time alive)	Yes
The good practice is to be found at (web.address)	https://www.mexoxo.com/
Website of the organisations	https://www.mexoxo.com/
E-mail	hope@mexoxo.org

 

Presentation/Description of the method

MeXOXO is a non-profit organization that educates women and youth on entrepreneurship. Since 2013 they have helped 5.000 women in 10 countries: Mexico, United States, Nepal, Liberia, Cyprus, Germany, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Moldova and Greece. MeXOXO is supported by several large organizations such as The Coca-Cola Foundation, Procter & Gamble, and Algida. In 2015 Elpida Kokkota, the founder of the organisation, made a commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative to empower 5.000 women until 2020 and she did fulfil this pledge in the first month of 2020. 5.000 women were trained and mentored on entrepreneurship and how to make their ideas real, by creating their own companies. From the 5.000 women:

• 95% made the next step,
• 40% received 1:1 mentorship,
• 65% collaborated among them.

 

General objectives

MeXOXO is shaping the lives of women and youth around the world. Their workshops and one on one mentoring sessions are providing a holistic approach to developing entrepreneurial skills. The organization, through 5000by2020 project is dedicated to stepping up women’ efforts in developing a culture of creativity and innovation. The following activities were carried out:

• Ideation Workshops
• One to one mentoring

 

Target group-participants

Target group are women who are interested in entrepreneurship and they want to participate to mentoring sessions, in order to make their dreams come true.  

Why it has been selected as good practice

5000by2020 project has been selected as a good practice, for the following reasons:

• Project focus on women who wants to create their companies. Win on-line project also has as target group women who wants to create their own e-business.
• Mentoring is one of the activities, which took place during the implementation of 5000by2020 Win on-line project also include mentoring sessions with women who have specific business ideas and they want to take the next stet and create their own companies.

 

Final comment

MeXOXO is a very active organization in empowering women to be entrepreneurs. The organization is implementing the following actions in order to help women:

• Counting Stars. It is an educational program, which educates and empowers women in Greece on entrepreneurship with the support of The Coca-Cola Foundation.
• Women Retailers - Kiosk Owners. Since 2016, MeXOXO held 4 seminars aiming in helping 150 women retailers on how to improve their skills in sales, communication and promotion (social media).
• Hult Prize Greece. Hult Prize is the world's largest student competition, aimed to the promotion of social wellbeing. It happens once a year and aims to solve a social problem. The prize for the winner is a $ 1,000,000 grant, in order to create a social enterprise. MeXOXO, managed to bring this event to Greece in 2016, 2017, 2018.
• FxD is the first global fashion festival in the Digital era. The goal of MeXOXO With FxD, is to inspire and train 5,000 young women in Fashion, Technology and Self-created Entrepreneurship through speeches from successful people in fashion.

  In 2017 Elpida Kokkota and MeXOXO got awarded by GIWA for her global impact and in January 2018 reached the 5 top finalists at Chivas Venture and awarded for her social impact. On 2019, MeXOXO created oppportunnties of 1M€ for the women who were supported by the organisation.   Finally, there are more others organizations and communities in Greece, aiming in empowering and supporting female entrepreneurship. Some of them are:

• Women Act is a non-profit non-partisan organization that aims at empowering women in fulfilling their political, social, cultural and economic potential by generating knowledge, providing training and connecting with the civil society. They support equal opportunities for all, women and men alike and they promote women as leaders and agents of change.
• Women On Top is an organization for the professional empowerment of women and for equality at the workplace. Using mentoring, lifelong learning, consulting and content creation as tools, they seek to support working and unemployed women and their environment so that together they can create a more equal future for all.
• SEGE is a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) with a Pan-Hellenic non-profit nature and regards women engaged in business activities in Greece. SEGE collaborates with ministries, social partners, business associations and NGOs at local and European level to promote the interests of women engaged in business.