Title: Rural Opportunities and Outreach for Tomorrow
Duration: 32 months (01/10/2025 – 31/6/2028)
Location: Serbia, Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt, Türkiye and Spain
Donor: EU Commission.
At a time when the Mediterranean region is navigating a dual crisis — rising youth unemployment and accelerating rural depopulation — a new Erasmus+ project is stepping in with concrete, future-oriented answers. ROOT (Rural Opportunities and Outreach for Tomorrow) is a 32-month capacity building initiative co-funded by the European Union under the Erasmus+ Programme (project number 101243317), bringing together six organisations from across Europe and the Southern Mediterranean to tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing young people today.
The ROOT consortium unites Creative Station (Serbia, coordinator), Jovesolides Egypt (Egypt), Corbiz (Türkiye), ABARKA ONGD (Spain), ISET Sfax (Tunisia), and the Jordan Youth Innovation Forum Society (Jordan) — a truly cross-border partnership spanning Programme and Partner countries, and reflecting the transnational spirit at the heart of the project.
ROOT was born from a clear and urgent observation: rural and urban youth are living in parallel worlds that rarely meet, each holding half of the solution the other needs.
Rural youth in countries like Jordan, Egypt, and Tunisia face unemployment rates exceeding 25–32%, limited digital access, and dwindling economic opportunities as traditional agricultural communities decline. Meanwhile, urban youth — digitally savvy and entrepreneurially minded — remain disconnected from sustainable practices, nature-based economies, and their own cultural heritage. Between 2005 and 2020, active farms across the Mediterranean declined by 37%, and over 60% of traditional agricultural knowledge risks being lost within a generation.
ROOT bridges these two worlds. By connecting urban and rural young people through the lens of agritourism — a sector with an estimated annual potential of €8.5 billion across the Mediterranean — the project creates a space where complementary skills meet, business ideas take shape, and rural communities are revitalised. Urban youth bring digital literacy and entrepreneurial thinking; rural youth contribute ecological knowledge and local insight. Together, they co-create.
ROOT is structured around three specific objectives, each designed to generate measurable and lasting change:
The overarching goal of ROOT is to empower young people and youth workers to develop sustainable agritourism initiatives by closing the gap between urban and rural communities. Through education, experiential practice, and international collaboration, the project enhances youth employability, revitalises rural economies, and strengthens the capacity of youth organisations to drive sustainable development.
ROOT directly aligns with the EU Youth Strategy 2019–2027 and its three core pillars — Engage, Connect, and Empower — as well as with the European Green Deal, the European Skills Agenda, and multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 8 (Decent Work), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption), SDG 13 (Climate Action), and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals).
The project’s primary target groups are youth aged 18–25 from diverse urban and rural backgrounds, and the youth workers who support and mentor them. Over the course of the project, ROOT aims to build capacity for 18 youth workers, run local bootcamps for 120 young people, and engage 30 participants directly in international mobility activities.
ROOT’s approach is multi-layered, participatory, and built for real-world impact. Rather than delivering passive training, the project immerses participants in an active learning journey that moves from research and skill-building to ideation, competition, and long-term implementation.
The RootED Youth Workers’ Handbook provides facilitators with adaptable, non-formal education tools tailored to agritourism and sustainable entrepreneurship contexts across the six partner countries.
The Interactive RootED Toolkit is designed for peer learning and community engagement, giving youth workers ready-to-use activities for workshops and local bootcamps where urban and rural youth collaborate to develop agritourism business concepts.
The Digital Agritourism Academy is an open-access online platform featuring video tutorials, case studies, and gamified challenges. It ensures that learning resources remain accessible long after the project concludes, regardless of geographic location or internet connectivity constraints.
Local RootED Agro-Lab Bootcamps bring young people together in each partner country for intensive sessions combining learning, ideation, and teamwork — applying knowledge to concrete local challenges in the agritourism sector.
Youth Mobility and the International Ideathon represent the project’s centrepiece: 30 young participants from across the consortium come together internationally (hosted in Spain) to form multicultural teams and tackle real-world agritourism challenges, competing in a structured hackathon environment that rewards innovation, collaboration, and practical thinking.
The RootED Digital Map creates a living network connecting rural innovators, youth organisations, and agritourism stakeholders across Europe and the Mediterranean — a resource that grows and evolves beyond the project’s lifetime.
Finally, a Policy Recommendations Paper translates the project’s findings and participant voices into actionable input for policymakers, advocating for the embedding of youth-led rural innovation into future policy frameworks at national and European levels.
Throughout all activities, ROOT employs gamification, peer-to-peer learning, and intercultural exchange to ensure engagement, knowledge retention, and genuine transformation — positioning young people not as passive beneficiaries, but as the active architects of their communities’ futures.
ROOT is co-funded by the European Union through the Erasmus+ Programme. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the project partners and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA).
