The RYCO open call: what it funds, and what actually gets selected

The Regional Youth Cooperation Office was founded by the six Western Balkans Contracting Parties to bring young people in the region into contact with each other. Everything about how it assesses applications follows from that purpose. Projects that move young people across borders and put them in genuine contact do well. Projects that would run identically without the regional dimension do not, however well written they are.

What RYCO funds

RYCO funds youth exchange and regional cooperation projects that support reconciliation, intercultural dialogue and youth participation across the Western Balkans. In practice that means activities where young people from different Contracting Parties spend time together, work on something jointly, and come away changed by the contact rather than simply informed by it.

Grants are modest and projects are short, usually a few months, with all activities taking place in the region. Each call sets its own envelope, grant range and duration, and defines thematic lots that applications must choose between.

Who can apply

• Non-profit civil society organisations registered in one of the six Contracting Parties: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia.
• A partnership is mandatory. At least one partner must be registered in a different Contracting Party than the lead applicant, and having partners from more than one additional Contracting Party is treated as an advantage.
• Partners must be established organisations, with a minimum period of legal existence set by each call.
• Collaborators such as schools, cultural institutions, sports associations and informal youth groups can support a project without receiving funding.
• Supporting documents are mandatory. Signed partner declarations and the other items on the call's checklist have to arrive with the application.

How selection works

RYCO assesses applications in stages, and each stage tests something different.

The eligibility check

Before quality is considered at all, RYCO verifies that the application is complete, that the required supporting documents are attached, and that the applicant, the partners, the activities and the costs are eligible. Applications that fail here are not passed on, whatever their content.

The expert quality assessment

Applications that pass are assessed by independent external experts against the criteria published in that call's guidelines. This produces a shortlist, drawn per Contracting Party rather than across the region as a whole.

The strategic review

RYCO's Selection Committee then reviews the shortlist against strategic considerations, including the likelihood of lasting impact beyond the direct participants, and how the project fits alongside everything else RYCO is funding.

What RYCO looks for

Across calls, the same four concerns recur, whatever the exact wording and weighting of a given grid:

• Understanding of context. Whether the proposal shows a real grasp of the challenges young people face in the specific communities involved, including those with fewer opportunities.
• The quality of the method. Whether the activities create genuine dialogue, cooperation and learning between participants, rather than delivering content to an audience.
• The partnership. Whether partners bring complementary strengths and are actually involved in designing and running the work, not only listed in it.
• Capacity and follow-through. Whether the organisation can manage the money and the risks, and whether anything continues after the project ends.

Where applications fall short

1. A generic regional story. Text that could have been written for any Contracting Party reads exactly like that to an assessor who has read forty applications.
2. Activities without interaction. A programme of presentations and a closing conference is well organised and weak for this funder.
3. A silent partner. An organisation that appears in the partner table and nowhere in the plan of work is a visible weakness.
4. Inclusion declared, not planned. Stating that you value including young people with fewer opportunities is not the same as saying how you will reach them.
5. Nothing after the final activity. With projects this short, what continues afterwards has to be argued explicitly.
6. A missing signature. The cheapest rejection there is, and it happens every round.

The grid that matters is the one in your own call

RYCO publishes a scoring grid in the guidelines of every call, with the criteria, their weights and the questions assessors answer. Those change between calls, between lots and between funding rounds. Reproducing one here would be useless to you and out of date within a round.

Evalora works from the call document you actually received. Upload the guidelines and the Evalora Engine extracts what that specific call contains: the criteria and their weights, the eligibility rules, the partnership requirements, the required supporting documents, the budget rules and the deadline. It then scores your draft against that structure criterion by criterion, marks requirements that are unmet, ranks the improvements by the points they recover, and runs an evaluator simulation that returns a predicted score with reviewer-style comments.

Eva, the advisor built into the platform, then helps you implement each change in the document itself, recorded as a tracked change with a change log so you can see exactly what moved between versions.

This is also why a general chat assistant handles this badly. It has not read your call, holds no record of which criterion is weak, and produces a different judgement each time you ask. The reasoning is in what general AI models miss on grant proposals.

Frequently asked questions

Source: the Regional Youth Cooperation Office open call documents and guidelines for applicants. Eligibility, grant ranges, durations and scoring are set per call, so confirm every figure in the guidelines for the call you are applying to.