FLEE-ASSET aims at strengthening the capacity of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in several countries of the European Union (EU) and Latin American (LA) regions, to develop different educative tools and training programs to ensure solid standards of decent work in EU-LA agricultural and trade relations and the fight against labour exploitation.

The agrifood business often lacks mechanisms to ensure an appropriate level of protection for workers and their rights. And agricultural workers and, in particular migrant workers in this field, are an easy prey to abuse, easily shifting into victims of labour exploitation or even forced labour.

The proposal is aligned with a top European Commission’s priority at the crossroads of fair trade, human rights an labour standards international cooperation. The proposal identifies the educative and training dimension of such EU objectives and fits them within the Erasmus + program priorities positioning an EU-LA transregional consortium composed of 11 HEIs in 7 countries, in a leading position to expand the number and qualifications of professionals involved in promoting decent work and fight labour exploitation in the agricultural sector (and as a result human trafficking for such purpose).

In doing so, HEIs will have to adapt to a new collaborative environment where flexibility, transnational, interinstitutional and market-oriented design of teaching and training is strongly required, but not matched by other public or private educative/training providers. In this sense, the training devised will innovatively blend theoretical and practical training, be based on case-studies and problem-solving learning schemes, built around different professional profiles and strongly learner-oriented, and more relevantly it will be co-designed and cocreated between HEIs and key stakeholders on the field (business organizations but also public institutions and civil sector).