Erasmus+ is the European Union’s programme that aims to modernize and internationalize education, vocational training and youth work.
For individuals, it offers opportunities for the development of their skills on all three components (knowledge, skills, attitudes) as well as to exchange experiences with people with similar interests from other countries.
For organizations, it offers financial support in order to develop their managerial capacity to better respond to the needs of the beneficiaries they serve and to the communities they support through international projects.
All details can be accessed on the official website of the programme, www.erasmusplus.ro.
Budget and implementation period
With a total budget of 14.7 billion euros for the period 2014 – 2020, Erasmus+ will involve approximately 4,000,000 students, teachers, young people, volunteers, youth workers etc. of which approx. 130,000 from Romania. The estimated budget for Romanian projects is approximately 450 million Euros during the seven years of operation.
Types of projects
Within the framework of Erasmus +, three different types of projects can be supported through the National Agencies: mobility projects, strategic partnerships projects and dialogue for youth projects.
Mobility projects
They cover all five areas of the Programme: adult education, school education, vocational training, higher education and youth, representing those institutional projects through which activities involving partners from several countries (trans-national) are carried out.
The program of a mobility project is different from one field to another and may include training courses, placements, teaching activities, youth exchanges, job-shadowing activities.
Strategic partnership projects
All five areas are covered: adult education, school education, vocational training, higher education and youth.
Strategic partnership projects aim to support the development, transfer and / or implementation of innovative practices, as well as the implementation of joint initiatives with the aim of promoting cooperation, peer learning and exchange of experience at European level.
In accordance with the objectives and the structure of the strategic partnership, projects can be:
- projects to support innovation (with intellectual products) aiming to develop innovative results and / or to provide structured dissemination and exploitation of already existing innovative intellectual products or
- projects to support the exchange of good practices (without intellectual products) that focus on the learning process, offering the possibility for the involved organizations to work at transnational level, to share ideas, practices or working methods, also producing tangible results
Dialogue for youth projects
They target only the youth field and promote structured dialogue as a tool used by young people to make their voice heard on how youth policies at European level need to be developed and implemented through interaction with decision makers (at local, regional, national, European level). In this respect, different activities can be financed: meetings, conferences, consultations or events which promote the active participation of young people through their interaction with decision-makers.
Centralized actions
In addition to the “decentralized” projects funded by the National Agency of Romania, there is also a number of financing opportunities (“centralized” projects) that can be accessed directly at the Executive Agency for Education, Audiovisual and Culture in Brussels.
These types of projects target the following thematic areas (details HERE):
- Knowledge alliances
- Alliances for sectoral competences
- Development of institutional capacity in the youth field
- Development of institutional capacity in higher education
- Jean Monnet
- Sports