European Partnership Help Center

Welcome to the ERA-LEARN Help Center for European Partnerships. Here you will find a collection of frequently asked questions and answers from our webinars and events. More questions and answers will be added over time. If you have any partnership related questions, please send them to office@era-learn.eu and we will add them to the Help Center.

EU Grant Agreements include obligations such as “giving visibility to EU funding as appropriate”. Is it mandatory that contracts from beneficiaries to third parties have such obligations expressed in writing?

The safest approach is to include these obligations in a written agreement with the final recipients of EU funding. An audit may check that the obligations are extended to final recipients. If a final recipient does not comply with these obligations, the final responsibility will fall on the coordinator of the partnership. Therefore, it is recommended that such obligations are included in the Financial Agreement with the final beneficiaries.
How can partnerships deal with the issue of multiple national authorities in international collaboration projects when the underlying data model only allows one funding agency to be identified per project?

The Commission acknowledges this issue and is working on updating the template to allow participants to submit more than one funding agency. The updated template will be released soon.
How should participant EU contributions for co-funded partnerships be reported, given that funded projects don't directly receive EC funding?

Participant EU Contribution: This is the exact amount of EU funding formally allocated to each participant directly within the grant agreement. Net EU Contribution: This represents a participant's share of EU funding minus any amounts that are forwarded or assigned to their linked third parties, as per the Commission’s official definitions. The Beneficiary/Third-Party Relationship: Both "Net EU Contribution" and "EU Contribution (contractual)" are directly tied to the relationship between a Beneficiary and one or more Third Party: Beneficiaries are the entities that sign the grant agreement with the Commission and are formally assigned an EU Contribution. Linked third parties, conversely, do not sign the agreement and therefore have an official EU Contribution of zero. Project EU Contribution should equal the sum of all Participant (i.e., beneficiaries + third parties) NET EU Contributions, which should also equal the sum of all Participant EU Contributions without any unintended multiplications. A full explanation can be found in the slides and within the webinar.
Can keys be generated by participants themselves for secure file transfer (SFTP) to avoid sharing private keys?

Partnerships generating their own keys and sharing only public keys is not possible under the current setup. This raises concerns about key security and so partnerships should discuss their specific requirements with the Commission if an alternative approach is needed.
During the submission process, can mistakenly submitted XML files be deleted?

Yes, it is possible. Mistakes can be corrected upon request via email (functional mailbox: rtd-egdr-dataimport@ec.europa.eu ).
Is it possible to omit the PIC for participants in proposals that were not funded, especially since, initially, it was not mandatory at the pre-proposal stage? It is very resource-intensive and impractical to retrospectively collect this data from proposals that were never funded.

The Participant Identification Code (PIC) is currently mandatory. It is still possible to register the participant in the F&T Portal and request a PIC. The Commission acknowledges that this requirement poses practical issues for many partnerships and is considering how it might be overcome. At this time, however, it is not possible to omit the PIC.