What helps sustainable and green businesses succeed? This is the main question that RESET is trying to answer through the development of its main activities. To do so, in the last couple of months our 5 partner countries conducted a series of interviews with both ongoing and implemented EU-funded projects focused on green business development to extract key learnings and meaningful outputs that will be replicated them in other contexts.

19 interviews were conducted in total through online meetings with project managers and surveys sent to the main beneficiaries of the selected projects. From this point on, all the functional knowledge is going to be categorized in different units to make it accessible to potential stakeholders. After having identified, located, gathered and analysed the best practices on how best to support sustainable and green entrepreneurs and start-ups, now it’s moment to collect all this knowledge and make it accessible.

The forms of the extracted existing knowledge from the 19 key EU-projects include best practices, handbooks, training programs, policy papers, databases, online platforms and networking services. With this knowledge, the main goal is to reinforce new projects specialized in support services to start-ups, to better inform public bodies, and ultimately, to support more entrepreneurs and direct more investments.

On a more deep-dive approach, information gathered can be capitalised upon in the following categories:

• The effectiveness of the implemented and ongoing projects.
• The level of ‘green practices’ that were implemented vs what is expected.
• The sustainability of these green practices and their effect on the ecosystem.
• The sustainability of created initiatives and the stream of income for entrepreneurs, especially women and youth.

Once knowledge is gathered, where it is needed to be disseminated?

This is the next step where RESET is going to put all its efforts. After the conduction of the interviews, it’s time for the creation of a stakeholders mapping and exploration of their needs and priorities. The mapping has been done in the last few months searching stakeholders on Algeria, Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia and Israel.

The main goal is to understand what knowledge is needed by stakeholders and favour the matching, all partners will work on a local level to identify local actors (firms, organisations, policy-makers, local authorities, research centres, etc.). RESET partners are carrying out bilateral meetings with the identified potential local stakeholders with the aim to draw an overall map of potential key actors and understand the needed knowledge.