The CEI Cooperation Fund: small grants, a high bar, and one thing it really wants

The Central European Initiative is one of the older regional cooperation structures in this part of Europe, and its Cooperation Fund is the instrument through which it finances small projects between institutions in its Member States. The grants are modest, the application is manageable, and the scoring logic is unusual enough that it deserves reading carefully before you decide whether to spend a week on the application.

What the Fund finances

The CEI Cooperation Fund supports capacity building through the transfer and sharing of know-how between institutions in CEI Member States. That phrase is not decoration. It is the filter, and it explains most rejections.

A proposal to deliver a service to a community, however valuable, is not a know-how transfer proposal. A proposal in which one institution that has solved a problem teaches institutions that have not yet solved it, with a mechanism for that knowledge to stay behind, is exactly what the Fund is for. Everything in your application should make that direction of travel visible: who holds the know-how, who receives it, and what they will be able to do afterwards that they cannot do now.

There is a bar, and it is higher than it looks

Each criterion is appraised on a short scale running from not satisfactory up to excellent, and a proposal has to reach a stated minimum across those criteria to be considered for co-financing. The exact scale and the minimum are set out in each call.

The part worth working out before you write is what that minimum actually demands. On a short scale the bar sits well above the middle of the range, which means a proposal that is merely good on every criterion does not reach it. You need a majority of criteria assessed above good.

Contribution, budget and flagship events

• A modest contribution ceiling per proposal, set in each call.
• An overall indicative budget for the round, with part of it usually allocated under the CEI Thematic Agenda.
• A separate amount for CEI Flagship Events, where the call defines what qualifies.

Two things follow. First, because individual grants are small, the Fund can support a meaningful number of proposals in a round, which makes the competition less brutal than the headline budget suggests. Second, if your activity genuinely fits the Flagship Event definition in the current call, that is a separate pot worth checking before you write.

Who can apply

• Public and private institutions registered in a CEI Member State.
• Non-governmental organisations and civil society organisations.
• International organisations.

The CEI Member State list is the first thing to verify for your partners, because it is not identical to the EU, to the Western Balkans grouping or to any other list you may already have in a template. Take it from the current call text rather than from memory or from a previous application.

Writing for a know-how transfer fund

1. Name the know-how. Not "expertise in youth work" but the specific method, system or practice being transferred, and who developed it.
2. Name the receiving institutions and their starting point. Transfer only makes sense against a described gap.
3. Describe the mechanism. Study visit, training of trainers, joint methodology development, mentoring. The mechanism is what an assessor scores, not the intention.
4. Show what stays. A manual, a trained team, an adopted procedure. Capacity building means something persists inside an institution after the activity.
5. Keep the budget proportionate. At this grant size, a budget stretched to fit the ceiling is far more visible than it would be on a large project.

CEI next to the other regional funds

The CEI Cooperation Fund sits in the same size class as the Western Balkans Fund, but the two want different things. WBF wants regional cooperation across at least three Western Balkans parties and requires mandatory co-financing. CEI wants know-how to move between institutions in its Member States, which is a wider geography and a narrower purpose.

If your project is a youth exchange, RYCO fits better. If you can assemble V4 partners, the Visegrad Fund offers larger sums with up to full coverage of costs. If the project is training-led with a partnership across programme countries, Erasmus+ KA210 is the entry route. Choosing the right instrument is worth more than any amount of rewriting inside the wrong one.

Checking your draft

On a short scale the useful question is not whether a section is present but whether it would read as very good rather than good to someone with no attachment to your project. Take each criterion in the current call, and for each one write down the single piece of evidence that would move it up a grade. If you cannot name that evidence, the criterion is sitting where it is, and a few criteria sitting at good will cost you the bar.

The Evalora Engine reads the call you upload and scores against the criteria it actually contains, on whatever scale that call uses. It flags unmet requirements, ranks the improvements by the points they recover, and runs an evaluator simulation that returns per-criterion comments in the language reviewers use. Eva then helps write each fix into the document, with the change recorded so you can see what moved between versions.

Frequently asked questions

Source: the Central European Initiative, CEI Cooperation Fund call for proposals announcements and the CEI Cooperation Fund Call for Proposals 2025. Budgets, thresholds and eligible themes are set per call, so confirm them in the current call text.