The project aimed to facilitate access to centralised EU programmes (without national co-financing) for adult education institutions (especially those with little or no experience of participating in EU programmes). To this end, the project team wanted to provide an information pathway in the form of an online professionalisation tool. The tool should enable adult education institutions to assess the benefits and requirements of EU programmes for projects and international cooperation and to decide in which cases a programme is suitable and promising for the institution. The collection and documentation of the necessary knowledge and the development of the information path should also strengthen the competence of the institutions involved in the partnership to find further access to EU programmes and networks.
A working group on adult education (AE) in the EU with the participation of CONEDU and Auxilium has found that knowledge about EU programmes and their accessibility is not sufficiently widespread among AE institutions - especially among smaller and inexperienced organisations. Although there are numerous websites with the necessary information, they are often experienced as high-threshold and do not sufficiently facilitate access to funding programmes. There were also some projects that dealt with EU programmes and their funding on an analytical level. What was missing, however, was an openly accessible, easy-to-use instrument that was tailored to the needs of AE organisations. It is particularly important for AE to collect and make accessible the know-how required for successful participation in EU programmes: According to a study by the EAEA (2018), AE organisations are often dependent on project funding - especially when they are dedicated to tasks in which companies invest little but which are important to society (e.g. democracy education, European citizenship). Participation in projects is therefore necessary for AE organisations and is also a declared objective of the EU Commission.