Project at a Glance

Objective & Summary

Youth unemployment among agricultural graduates on both sides of the Greece–North Macedonia border stayed stubbornly high even though the region’s comparative advantage — agricultural production and food processing — was sitting largely untapped. RENAISSANCE set out to connect the two: training graduates and young farmers in innovative agricultural practice and entrepreneurship, and helping them turn ideas into start-ups, through boot camps, an accelerator programme, and a permanent network linking academia, industry, the public sector and civil society.

GAUSS Institute won three of the service contracts underpinning that effort, spanning the project’s communications, its evidence base, and its accelerator design.

GAUSS Institute’s three separately contracted service lots within Project RENAISSANCE

Role & Activities of the GAUSS Institute

• Processed and published trilingual content — roughly 30 pages, 100 images, 20 videos and 20 files per the project scope — for a joint website developed and hosted by the Greek partners, translating and formatting everything GAUSS received in Macedonian or Greek into all three languages.
• Designed and distributed the project’s newsletter and four press releases, and built and ran its Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram profiles bilingually.
• Built and committed to hosting an e-learning platform for a minimum of seven years, supporting trainers in posting their own course materials.
• Ran all three field surveys under an Agile, sprint-based methodology — an approach more familiar from software development than agricultural research — breaking each survey into short iterations (planning, questionnaire design, field visits, data entry, analysis) with the Contracting Authority reviewing progress after every step.
• Personally visited and interviewed 60 farms, 15 agro-enterprises, and 50 stakeholders and graduates across the Greece–North Macedonia cross-border area, entering every response into a structured database for the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food in Skopje to analyse.
• Researched existing acceleration and incubation initiatives in the cross-border area through desk research and field interviews with past and present participants, and proposed curricula and syllabuses for the new agricultural accelerator, drawing on international best practice.
• Provided continuous operational and technical backstopping from GAUSS’s own premises throughout all three contracts, led by project manager Vesna Nedelkovska, with reports signed off by Dr. Beti Angjelevska, Director of GAUSS Institute.

Outputs (Deliverables)

• Trilingual website content, newsletter, press releases and social media profiles for the RENAISSANCE project.
• An e-learning platform, operable and hosted for at least seven years.
• Three structured questionnaires and completed action plans for the farm, agro-enterprise and stakeholder/graduate surveys.
• Three databases — 60, 15 and 50 records respectively — delivered to the Contracting Authority in Macedonian and English, each with an accompanying scientific field-mission report.
• A report on past and present acceleration initiatives in the cross-border area.
• A proposed curriculum and syllabus for the RENAISSANCE agricultural business accelerator.

Outcomes

GAUSS’s own final reports to the National Extension Agency record no deviations from any of the three contracts and describe “excellent cooperation” with both the Contracting Authority and the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and Food in Skopje throughout. Every survey target was met precisely — 60 farms, 15 agro-enterprises, 50 individuals — giving the Faculty’s researchers a complete, on-time evidence base for their three studies, while the accelerator groundwork gave Project RENAISSANCE a curriculum grounded in what had and hadn’t worked in similar programmes elsewhere in the region.

Significance