ERDF and ESF+

The European Regional Development Fund pays for things: infrastructure, research capacity, SME competitiveness, digitisation, energy efficiency, urban regeneration. The European Social Fund Plus pays for people: employment, skills, education, social inclusion, and reducing poverty. Together they are the largest source of EU funding for most organisations that are not universities.

Both are allocated to countries and regions in advance rather than competed for continentally. Because the envelope for your region is already fixed, you are competing with applicants in your own region for a pot that was set aside for it, a materially different proposition from a Horizon call open to twenty-seven countries at once.

Regions are classified by prosperity, and the classification sets how much of a project the EU will pay. Less developed regions can receive up to 85% co-financing, transition regions up to 70%, and more developed regions up to 40%. The rest comes from national, regional or private sources, so the same project in two regions leaves its promoter with very different bills.

Spending is concentrated by rule rather than by preference. Programmes must direct defined shares of ERDF towards a smarter and a greener Europe, which is why calls for digitisation and energy efficiency keep appearing while calls for other perfectly sensible things do not. Reading the region's programme document tells you which of your ideas has a route to money and which does not.

The reporting burden is real and front-loaded onto the beneficiary. Procurement rules, publicity obligations, indicator reporting and document retention all apply, and they are checked. A structural-fund grant is easier to win than a Horizon grant and harder to administer per euro received.