Connect entrepreneurs, companies and young people with initiatives in Terres de l'Ebre to facilitate the creation of economic activity in the territory, retaining and helping to return talent to municipalities in rural areas.
This is the ambitious objective that the organizers of four Odisseu networking events have set, with sessions that will be held throughout the months of September and October in Amposta, L'Ametlla de Mar, Tortosa and Prat de Comte.
They will specifically address topics as diverse as robotics, fishing and framing, artificial intelligence in communication or the completion of university studies on the opportunities offered by the territory.
The Odisseu program, in which the Local Leader Action Groups of Catalonia participate, running since 2011, made it possible to organize the first networking of Catalonia in Terres de l'Ebre a year later.
It started from the diagnosis at the national level of the territory's own strengths and the ability to promote the generation of activity by connecting entrepreneurs and young people who value the option of being able to develop their professional career without having to go to big cities, first to study and then to work on them.
"We have managed to make the young people of the territory and the rest of the population see that here we have a wide range of training activities and, upon completing them, what we can do is return here, give opportunities, explain what we have done, create new projects and value that the young people from here in Terres de l'Ebre are powerful," said the territorial coordinator of Youth, Laia Gómez.
The conferences are presented as a point of contact between young people, companies and entrepreneurs to expand mutual knowledge of the existing options in the territory. The first of the scheduled sessions will take place in Prat de Comte (Terra Alta), on September 30.
It aims to generate synergies so that university students focus their final degree or master's thesis on the search for opportunities and projects in the rural world. It is there where young students go to train so that, quite possibly, they do not end up returning to the territory, unaware, in many cases, that there are real options to return.
"Perhaps we will have to consider that universities have more locations in rural territories and talent does not have to leave in various topics, such as the environmental one that is in rural areas. However, we send them to study in the city and we have to do that start considering it," stressed the manager of the Ribera d'Ebre and Terra Alta Interregional Consortium of Socioeconomic Initiatives, Begoña García.
The second of the conferences, on collaborative robotics, will take place in Amposta on October 5th. The calendar is completed by a conference in L'Ametlla de Mar on October 27 on topics related to the economy of the Sea and in Tortosa, on November 17, on the possibilities of Artificial Intelligence in communication.
Within the same project, as pointed out by the manager of the Consortium for the Development of Baix Ebre and Montsià, Rubén Alegria, the Practicum Odisseu has allowed several young students to have carried out paid internships in companies in the territory with real options of being able to end up getting a job.
"It is true that there are needs and things that are not covered, that require these meetings and public-private collaboration. We have railway transport situations, for example, that condition. They are handicaps, challenges that we must be able to solve and not individually, from public collaboration -private", pointed out Marc Poy, technical coordinator of the Ateneo Cooperativo de las Terres de l'Ebre, which also participates in the project.
"The opportunity is there, but you must build it with other people. There are people with ideas and services in the territory who can advise them to turn it into an economic activity and earn a living," Poy concluded.
