Affordable age- and eco-friendly solutions for older adults

Status: Completed

Evaluated

The Hague Netherlands

Print this page City population: 52500020% over 60Practice started in 2025

Summary

The Hague University of Applied Sciences (Urban Ageing) and AFEdemy, age-friendly environments academy, both members of the Knowledge Platform Monitoring Age-friendly The Hague, joined forces to co-create and develop with five other international partners learning materials and an online learning place for older adults on age- and eco-friendly solutions. Erasmus+ Adult Education project 2022-2025: Empowering older adults to apply affordable age- and eco-friendly solutions to age in place.

The AFECO project aims to promote older adults’ skills and competencies, allowing them to analyse and use affordable, age-friendly, and eco-friendly principles in their physical environment (at home or in the neighbourhood). Age-friendly and eco-friendly principles should complement and support each other to create the right conditions for social inclusion, active ageing, and ageing in place through an environmentally responsible way of living.

The open accessible and free of costs learning materials consist of 9 learning modules, focusing on home adaptations, get together, health, safety and technology at home or around home. The learner can get personal advice on the best learning path by filling in the Age-friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire (AFCCQ) that was developed in The Hague in 2020.

Website: https://afeco.eu/en/entrance-afeco/

Key facts

Main target group: Older people in general

Other target group(s): Policymakers

Sector(s): Education, Health, Housing, Information and communication, Urban development

Other sector(s): Informal caregivers, formal caregivers, community workers, social work

Desired outcome for older people:
Learn, grow and make decisions

Other issues the Age-friendly practice aims to address:

Accessibility
Ageing in place
Inclusion
Participation
Technologies

Contact details

Name: Willeke Van Staalduinen

Email address: willeke@afedemy.eu

Age-friendly practice in detail (click to expand):

Engaging the wider community

Project lead: Private sector

Others involved in the project:

Local authorities
Civil Society Organisation
Older People’s Association
Social or health care provider
Volunteers
Private sector
Research institution

How collaboration worked: The partnership was created to jointly submit the AFECO proposal in the Erasmus+ call 2022. We took care that the partnership was a diverse mixture of research, public, social and private organisations (without profit intentions), representing multiple countries and angles from Europe. Co-creation with older adults was the core of the proposal and project to enable them to apply affordable solutions to age in place, to achieve social inclusion and participation in society were the main aims of the proposal. The project has been discussed within the Knowledge Platform Monitoring Age-friendly City The Hague, with – among others – representatives of the local authority, older people’s organisations and well-being organisations.

Older people’s involvement: Older people were involved in the age-friendly practice at multiple or all stages

Details on older people’s involvement: Older adults were involved in the project directly at the start (to assess their knowledge and learning gaps/interests), co-creation of the learning modules and the testing and validation of the final learning materials.

Moving forward

Has the impact of this age-friendly practice been analysed: Yes

Was the impact positive or negative:
Positive

Please share with us what you found in detail:
The learning materials have been tested and validated with over 120 older adults and 60 (in)formal caregivers. Overall, the learners are positive about the learning materials. Some learners want more in-depth materials, where others found them sufficient or too long.

Evaluation report: WP2-Good-practice-report-by-THUAS-final-23.6.23-1.pdf

Feedback:
The knowledge of older adults regarding age-friendly practices was rather widely covered in all countries, we learned from the initial assessment dialogues with older adults. There was a strong wish for affordable eco-friendly solutions in combination with age-friendly solutions to age in place. The usage of many pictures to indicate the learning is preferred above longer texts. A virtual assistant is found helpful, however it should also be possible to easily close the VA.

Expansion plans:
Yes, we want to connect the learning materials and learning place to organisations that are involved in providing age-friendly and eco-friendly solutions, such as Age-friendly World, smart homes, environmental organisations in every European country that is involved in the project.

Looking back

Reflections:
When we started to develop the modules, we initially intended to develop two strands: eco-friendly and age-friendly. After finalising the work by the partners, there was much overlap between the modules, so we decided to merge the modules and apply it to the ways older adults think and understand: At home and Around home. That worked much better. If we directly had decided this, we would have saved much time.

Challenges:
The main challenges is to limit the texts and replace by images. National languages are utmost important: Video links must be subtitled or comparable videos in national languages had to be found.