Qualifying to attract and retain professionals is essential if Europe's entrepreneurial ecosystem is to be attractive to investors and entrepreneurs. The conviction is shared by Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, and Ricardo Rio, Mayor of Braga, InvestBraga and now responsible for the talent priority, one of the four priorities of the Global StartupCities consortium's action plan.

With the strategic prority of talent to be led by Braga, Ricardo Rio highlighted, in the first edition of the Global StartupCities Summit, the importance of a clear commitment to the training and qualification of entrepreneurs and other professionals as a response to market and business needs, giving as examples some of the initiatives promoted by the municipality with the University of Minho or the Instituto de Emprego e Formaão Profissional (IEFP), such as the School of CEOs and the Qualifica.IT program. "Education and research are the pillars of the work that we have been developing in favour of the economy of Braga and entrepreneurship. We have developed a set of programmes that aim to complement the training of workers and, at the same time, help them to retrain, giving them the possibility to respond to the needs of companies, something essential to attract and capture employers and retain talent in our city," he said.

European Commissioner Mariya Gabriel said that "innovation is complementary to education and essential in all fields of research", and stressed the importance of attracting the attention of women and young people to entrepreneurship.

Ricardo Rio also reinforced the importance of the link between local authorities, educational institutions, research centres and economic agents for the development of cities, recalling that Braga has been working with the entrepreneurial fabric in order to get to know the needs of the labour market, stressing that this listening, together with Braga's participation in international initiatives such as the Talent Cities programme of the Global Parliament of Mayors and the Global StartupCities network, allows "to understand the skills sought by the markets and thus guide the training offer".

The Mayor also recalled that the city of Braga has been betting on the promotion of entrepreneurship among the youngest, allowing "students to get involved, train and train their skills in more technological areas, stimulating them to digital and entrepreneurship, building the way so that they can be future CEOs of startups".

It is recalled that the first Global StartupCities Summit was promoted by the European consortium Global StartupCities, supported by the European Commission, of which Braga is one of the founding cities.