How to make Europe greener and more digital are the twin challenges for our generation, and our success in meeting them will define our future.
The European Commission has begun to look at a greener Europe through the lens of the European Green Deal. At the same time, it is opening up discussions about the move to a more digital world: the digital transition.
Digital technology and infrastructure have a critical role in our private lives and business environments. We rely on them to communicate, work, advance science and answer current environmental problems. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted not only how much we rely on our technology to be available to us, but also how important it is for Europe not to be dependent on systems and solutions coming from other regions of the world. Paving the way for achieving this goal is DIGITAL programme.
The Digital Europe Programme will provide strategic funding to answer these challenges, supporting projects in five key capacity areas: in supercomputing, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, advanced digital skills, and ensuring a wide use of digital technologies across the economy and society, including through Digital Innovation Hubs. With a planned overall budget of €7.5 billion (in current prices), it aims to accelerate the economic recovery and shape the digital transformation of Europe’s society and economy, bringing benefits to everyone, but in particular to small and medium-sized enterprises.
The Digital Europe Programme will not address these challenges in isolation, but rather complement the funding available through other EU programmes, such as the Horizon Europe programme for research and innovation and the Connecting Europe Facility for digital infrastructure, the Recovery and Resilience Facility and the Structural funds, to name a few. It is a part of the next long-term EU budget, the Multiannual Financial Framework 2021-2027.
How to get funding under the Digital Europe programme
For the first years, the Digital Europe programme will be implemented through four work programmes :
- For all actions excluding those implemented by the other three work programmes as indicated below
- For the European Digital Innovation Hubs
- For Cybersecurity actions
- For High Performance Computing actions – the work programme will be prepared by the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking
They provide you with information on the content of the calls for Grants and Procurement opened for proposals in 2021 and 2022.
The first calls were published on 17 November.
The application process
Submit your proposal
If you wish to respond to a call, you must submit a proposal before 17:00 Brussels time on the day of the indicated call deadline. Please note that this deadline and specific time are strict and must be respected. The European Commission strongly advises to submit your proposal in good time and not to wait until the last moment.
All proposals need to be submitted online.
Find your partners
If you need help to identify a potential partner with particular competences, facilities or experience, use the partner search options.
Evaluation
Once the deadline has passed, all proposals are evaluated against the criteria published in the Work Programme, resulting in a list of proposals in priority order. Independent experts specialised in the relevant fields may be involved in the evaluation.
Grant agreement
When the evaluation is over, applicants are informed on the outcome.
The European Commission will draw up a grant agreement with each of the successful participants within the limits of the allocated budget. The grant agreement describes the activities to be undertaken, in line with the objectives of the call, the project’s duration, budget, rates and costs, as well as the European Commission's contribution, the rights and obligations and other specificities linked to the topic covering the specific grant agreement.
The time frame for signing the grant agreements is up to 9 months from the closure of the call.
