HUNGARY: 3rd. Call for Proposals of the Norwegian and EEA Financial Mechanisms launched
The third (and possibly last) call for proposals under the EEA Financial Mechanism for Hungary opened on June 1st. The application procedure has been changed and simplified. This time the number of projects funded will be higher and a new evaluation system has been introduced providing significant incentive for co-operation with Norwegian partners.
Following a suspension of the application process in February, the new round of calls opened as of 1 June 2007, and will be open until 31st August.
The reason for delaying the current round was the extensive revision of the entire application process based on the experiences of the first two rounds. These indicated that applicants face huge burdens with regard to financial and other resources even in the preliminary phase of the application process. Since a very high share of the projects were rejected either for minor formal reasons or for the content of the application, these, for many applicants, wasted costs caused a significant “disappointment factor”.
New two-step procedure
In order to remedy this, the managing authority, together with the Norwegian side worked out a revised application procedure, whereby it became a two-round process. In the first phase, instead of a fully-fledged application entailing a vast amount of documents, such as feasibility studies, permissions, detailed financial plans, only a few-page concept-paper needs to be delivered.
Rejection rate expected to be almosted halved
The relevant committees then select the most promising projects based on their merits, and only those qualified for the second round (approx. 150 proposals) need to develop the full documentation of the application. This is expected to save valuable resources for both the applicants and the evaluating committees, as the rejection rate is expected to fall from about 90% to around or below 50%.
More projects will get funds
Furthermore, all the remaining available funding will be allocated within this current round, thus the number of projects funded will be higher than in the case of the previous calls.
In order to further increase equality of opportunity for the most promising innovative projects, seed funding of EUR 5-20,000 has been made available (under certain criteria) for the development of the full documentation.
According to the official schedule, a final decision (i.e. including the approval of the Norwegian FMO) can be reached by mid-2008. Experiences of the previous rounds show, however, that the process is lagging significantly behind the original schedule: the final phase of the evaluations of the first round is still under way, and a final decision is at least 6 months overdue.
Incentives for Hungarian-Norwegian partnerships
A significant change for Norwegian parties is that, as opposed to the previous practice, where there were virtually no direct advantages of involving Norwegian partners (in the first round none of the winning projects had Norwegian participants), the new evaluation system provides significant incentives for such co-operations: Out of the total 100 points, 4, 6 and 10 points respectively can be given for projects which document Norwegian partnership agreements of various intensity (letter of intention, on-going co-operation etc.).
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Thus, Norwegian entities within the prioritized areas are encouraged to take part, and proposals for co-operation by Hungarian applicants can be expected over the coming weeks.
Priorities unchanged
The priority areas of the Mechanisms for Hungary are, however, unchanged, that is:
• Protection of the environment
• Sustainable development
• Maintaining European heritage
• Human resources development and education
• Healthcare
• Children and youth
• Regional development and cross-border co-operation
• Internal- and justice-affairs co-operation
As a further novelty, an individual NGO-fund of approx. EUR 6.5 mn will be set up shortly, however the documentation for the Hungarian calls has not been approved yet, and therefore does not constitute a part of the current call for proposals.
For more information contact Innovation Norway’s office in Budapest, Judit Ujfalussy (e-mail judit.ujfalussy@invanor.no ) or Tamas Polgar, e-mail: polgar.tamas@bitep.hu