Eligibility gate

An eligibility gate is a condition that decides admissibility before quality is considered at all. It is binary and it is checked first: entity type, country of establishment, size, sector, minimum partners, registration held, a deadline met. Fail one and the application is not read, however good it is.

The gates are the cheapest possible thing to check and the most expensive thing to get wrong. A month of writing lost to a condition stated in the second paragraph of the notice is an entirely avoidable failure, and it is common enough that both the American and European systems reject a meaningful share of applications on admissibility alone.

The most frequent traps are structural rather than obscure: an organisation that turns out not to meet the SME definition because of its ownership chain, a consortium whose third partner is an associated partner rather than a beneficiary, a registration that has not completed validation, an applicant type the programme excludes.

This is the principle behind Bemzu's fit check. Gates are assessed first and independently, because a call you cannot enter is not a ranked opportunity. It is a no, and it should be shown as one rather than as a low score.

Where a gate cannot be verified from the published data, the honest answer is that it is unchecked rather than passed. A system that quietly assumes eligibility produces confident recommendations that fail at the first administrative check, which is worse than saying nothing.