EEA Fund in Romania: EUR 1.5m for the Ukraine strand

The EEA Civil Society Fund in Romania is accepting applications for its third call until 8 October 2026 at 16:00 Romania time. Grants run from EUR 200,001 to EUR 350,000, with no co-financing required at all and a grant rate of 100 per cent.

Here is the headline point for a Ukrainian organisation. Only a non-governmental organisation legally established in Romania can act as applicant. However, the guidelines include Ukraine directly in the list of countries that project partners may come from, and Ukrainian CSOs qualify to receive funding as partners.

The call carries a dedicated allocation of EUR 1,555,624 for addressing challenges arising from the invasion of Ukraine. Romania hosts roughly 205,730 Ukrainians registered for temporary protection, and the target groups of the call should include displaced persons from Ukraine.

Who applies and where a Ukrainian organisation fits

The applicant comes from Romania only

Specifically, eligible applicants are associations, foundations or federations established under Romanian law through Government Ordinance 26/2000 or Law 21/1924, plus the National Red Cross Society in Romania. An applicant must stay independent of public authorities, political parties and commercial entities, avoid promoting religious doctrine, and take direct responsibility for designing and managing the project instead of acting as an intermediary.

Ukraine sits on the list of eligible partners

Section 5.2 of the Guidelines for Applicants lists where partners may come from: Romania, the Donor States (Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein), the Beneficiary States, and countries outside the European Economic Area sharing a border with Romania, namely Moldova, Ukraine and Serbia.

Partnership stays optional, although the programme encourages it strongly. A partner must share a common social goal with the applicant, take an active part and contribute effectively to project delivery.

What a partner can receive

In practice this is the clarification that matters most. Entities eligible to receive funding as project partners include non-commercial private entities such as CSOs, international intergovernmental organisations, public entities and informal groups meeting the stated requirements.

Meanwhile commercial entities may join as partners, although they cannot receive money from the grant even while contributing to project activities.

One restriction is worth seeing in advance. The organisational development allocation of up to 20 per cent of the budget covers the applicant and, where relevant, CSO partners from Romania. It does not extend to the organisational development of a Ukrainian partner.

What the call funds

The call sits under Outcome 2, Human rights strengthened, and pursues three objectives: strengthening underserved communities and marginalised groups, strengthening legal protection and institutional accountability, and supporting initiatives that protect the rights of people forced to flee, especially those displaced by the war in Ukraine.

In practice the approach has to be systemic: policy influence, institutional strengthening, and development of sustainable models that can be scaled up. Projects are encouraged to combine legal assistance, social support, community outreach, advocacy, monitoring and awareness-raising within joined-up response models.

Typical activities

• legal assistance and strategic litigation to improve access to justice;
• direct support for vulnerable groups: social, psychological and legal support, plus access to education, healthcare, housing and employment;
• education access programmes for children and youth from migrant or marginalised backgrounds, including tutoring and intercultural mediation;
• labour market integration: vocational training, job placement support, entrepreneurship assistance;
• monitoring, documenting and reporting human rights violations;
• campaigns against discrimination, xenophobia and stigma.

What the call excludes: individual scholarships, re-granting to other organisations, construction or purchase of buildings, and projects consisting primarily of equipment purchase. Social service provision on its own also falls outside, because it counts only where necessary for enhancing advocacy, community participation or civic engagement.

Conditions that make this call attractive

Three things here differ from most European programmes.

No co-financing. The grant rate is 100 per cent. For a Ukrainian organisation normally facing a 10 to 40 per cent own contribution, that removes the main barrier.

Duration of 36 to 48 months. This is stable funding across three or four years instead of an annual project. Also the final date of expenditure eligibility at programme level is 30 April 2031.

A rapid response mechanism. Between 3 and 5 per cent of the budget can be reserved for unforeseen actions that need no detailed description at application stage. You activate them during delivery when a situation demands immediate intervention.

Three weeks: what you can realistically achieve

Roughly three weeks remain before the deadline, and you cannot submit on your own. So the sequence differs from a standard call.

• Find a Romanian organisation already preparing an application. So look among those working with refugees, migrants and human rights in Romania, above all in the border counties and Bucharest.
• Offer what they lack. Work with the Ukrainian community, the language, an understanding of documents and statuses, and contacts among Ukrainian organisations. All of that strengthens their proposal directly under the relevance criterion.
• Sign the Partnership Declaration. Annex 4 goes in English for foreign partners and counts as a mandatory annex. Without it the proposal fails the administrative check.
• Prepare the contracting documents. Partners from outside Romania submit documents on legal personality translated into Romanian or English, plus CVs of all team members.

The operator takes questions until 29 September, seven working days before closing. Since answers appear on the programme website, check the published ones before writing.

How the proposal gets scored

First, two independent evaluators score proposals on a scale of 0 to 100. The minimum score for a recommendation to fund is 65.

• relevance and coherence: 35 points;
• design, methodology and feasibility: 30 points;
• multiplication effect and sustainability: 10 points;
• project budget: 10 points;
• applicant and partners: 15 points.

One cut-off worth knowing. A project scoring under 25 points on the relevance dimension drops out of further evaluation regardless of everything else. So weak justification of the problem closes the proposal before evaluators reach the budget.

Within the applicant and partners block, assessors separately score the justification of the partner role, the necessity and the added value of the partnership. So a Ukrainian partner should formulate its contribution in advance, in a form the Romanian applicant can lift straight into the proposal.

Other details

You may appeal decisions on administrative compliance within 10 calendar days of the notification date, to apel3csf@fdsc.ro. No new documents may go in with an appeal, and the content of the submitted application cannot change. The Steering Committee decision on selection carries no right of appeal.

The programme overall holds ten open calls with a total allocation of EUR 53,811,718. So even if this round proves too tight, keep the calls page bookmarked, because later rounds will run under the same rules on Ukrainian partners.