The third call under Horizon Europe of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-funded COFUND scheme closed on 8 February 2024. The European Research Executive Agency (REA) received 106 proposals.

By comparison, 107 proposals were submitted in 2022 and 30 were eventually selected for funding.

This year’s submitted proposals are distributed as follows

• Doctoral programmes: 49 proposals
• Postdoctoral programmes: 57 proposals

Through this call, the European Union is expected to fund around 30 projects and up to 1,000 researchers with an indicative budget of €96.57million.

Organisations based in 22 countries submitted the proposals, including

• France: 24 
• Spain: 18
• Germany: 11
• Ireland: 7
• United Kingdom: 6
• Italy and Poland: 5 each
• Denmark and Finland: 4 each
• Czech Republic, Sweden and Turkey: 3 each
• Austria, Croatia and Hungary: 2 each
• Belgium, Estonia, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia: 1 each

Funding for excellent doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes

Under this call, the European Commission will award €96.57 million to fund institutional, regional, national or international doctoral training and postdoctoral fellowship programmes.

• COFUND Doctoral Programmes offer doctoral candidates research training activities to develop and broaden their skills and competences, allowing them to obtain a doctoral degree.
• COFUND Postdoctoral Programmes fund individual advanced research training and career development fellowships for postdoctoral researchers.

These schemes spread the MSCA’s best practices by promoting high standards for selection and recruitment and excellent working and employment conditions.  They promote sustainable training and international, interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral mobility to

• train researchers and innovators in academia and beyond 
• allow them to enlarge their networks and share knowledge to carry out cutting-edge research
• provide them with new knowledge, skills, career development perspectives and employability
• boost their creativity and entrepreneurship

These programmes will also allow organisations to attract international talent and increase their attractiveness, their research and innovation capacities and their contribution to the local, regional and/or national socio-economic ecosystems.

Indicative timeline

• February 2024 to beginning of June 2024: evaluation coordinated by the REA and done by external independent expert evaluators
• June 2024: notification of call results to applicants
  • applicants will be able to access the results of the evaluation on their personal space of the Funding and Tenders Opportunities Portal
  • an overview of the evaluation results, cut-off scores and statistics will be published on the page of the call COFUND 2023

• October 2024: expected signature of the grant agreement with the European Commission for successful projects
• December 2024/January 2025: first EU-funded projects start