Skills and Education Guarentee Pilot

Overview

Objectives

The Skills and Education Guarantee Pilot aims to provide financing to higher education providers to enhance and develop what they can offer. This will increase access to education and training and reduce unequal opportunities, by reducing the financial burden on the participant, including by investing in SMEs for them to up- and re-skill their employees.

Activities/actions supported 

The Skills and Education Guarantee Pilot will:

• Support individuals, students and learners, in order to enhance their education attainment and skills level by unlocking access to finance to cover education and skills gap in Europe resulting from societal and technological transformations;
• Support the provision of employee training, apprenticeships and the skills transformation efforts by European enterprises by providing risk finance for improving the skills and skills utilisation of their workforce’s skill set;
• Enhance access to finance to both existing as well as new European organisations active in the field of skills, training and education or developing projects in education field with the objective of stimulating their development, growth and internationalisation;
• Support the development and/or deployment of services ancillary to skills, training and education.

Anticipated outcomes 

The Skills and Education Guarantee Pilot will remove the barriers to providing more skills and education training to get more people into the labour market and better respond to the economy's needs.

Institution providing the funding

European Investment Fund

Size of funding

€ 30.000-2 million

Conditions

Overview of eligibility criteria

Eligibility criteria include the following:

• Recipients can be: SMEs, Small Mid-Caps, Small Public Enterprises or natural persons which/who meet the Product Eligibility Criteria applicable to the relevant Final Recipient categories as specified in Annex IV to the call, available at https://www.eif.org/InvestEU/guarantee_products_calls/annex-iv-f-skills-education-termsheet.pdf

Overview of award criteria

Award criteria:

The EIF selects financial intermediaries according to a standard process involving due diligence and proof of compliance with relevant standards.

Procedures

Application procedures

Applicants must download and submitt the relevant application documents, to the EIF by the deadline: https://www.eif.org/InvestEU/guarantee_products_calls/annex-i-fi-application-eoi.docx

Application support available

More information can be found here: https://engage.eif.org/investeu/how-to-apply

Link to funding opportunity

Link to the programme for more info