The 1st Call for proposals within the Hungary-Slovakia-Romania-Ukraine ENPI CBC Programme 2007-2013, launched by the National Development Agency of Hungary, acting as Joint Managing Authority in co-operation with the Ministry of Construction and Regional Development of the Slovak Republic, the Ministry of Regional Development and Housing of Romania and the Ministry of Economy of Ukraine is closed. More than 13 million EUR ENPI funds were available within the first Call to support partnerships without borders.

The Programme supports cross-border projects with Ukraine on the border of Hungary, Slovakia and Romania with the overall objective to intensify and deepen cooperation in an environmentally, socially and economically sustainable way. In the frame of the Programme those co-operations are eligible for funding, in which a partner from Ukraine takes part besides at least one partner from Member States participating in the Programme.

Public and private actors coming from eligible territories and organised in partnerships had the opportunity to submit joint projects. Following types of organizations could inter alia apply for ENPI funds: local and regional public authorities, NGOs, development agencies, universities and research institutes, non-profit making private actors operating in the fields of intervention of the Programme.  The 13 million EUR indicative financing became available to support the joint development of tourism, SMEs, the co-operation in the field of environmental protection, emergency preparedness and co-operations between institutions or small scale people-to-people actions.

The total amount of financing requested by Applicants in the submitted project proposals exceeded 55 million EUR, which is four times more than the available ENPI allocation within the first Call.

The number of project proposals in a breakdown according to the Measures is demonstrated on the following diagram:

 The following diagram presents the breakdown of the requested ENPI funds according to Measures:

The most popular Measure proved to be 4.1 ‘Institutional co-operation’ attracting the highest number of project proposals, followed by 2.1 ‘Environmental protection, sustainable use and management of natural resources’ and 1.1 ‘Harmonized development of tourism’. Nevertheless, considering the amount of requested ENPI funding, the biggest share (35%) is represented by applications in the field of environmental protection and sustainable use of natural resources due to the larger size of these actions.

Most of the projects (61%) have a bilateral partnership (HU-UA, SK-UA or RO-UA), but there are also numerous trilateral (29%) and quadrilateral (10%) projects.

Currently, the administrative and eligibility check (Step 1) is taking place, which is performed by the Joint Technical Secretariat. Selected external assessors will carry out the quality assessment of the application forms (Step 2). Based on their assessments Project Selection Committees will discuss the project proposals and the Joint Monitoring Committee will take the final decision on projects to be approved and amount granted to them. Final decision on selected projects is expected in the first quarter of 2010.

The next Call for proposals of the Hungary-Slovakia-Romania-Ukraine ENPI CBC Programme is to be launched in the first half of 2010; the downloadable application package will be available on the programme’s website.

Further information on the Programme can be found on our website: www.huskroua-cbc.net or contact us by sending your e-mail to: info@huskroua-cbc.net