Call for Proposals dedicated to Horizon Europe: Support for networking activities through organizing workshops

The Transversal H2020/Horizon Europe Task Force was created in February 2020 in the framework of the CIVIS Alliance. This group, coordinated by the Head of the EU Office at Aix-Marseille Université, gathers representatives of every research and/or EU office at the Alliance's member universities. The Task Force’s remits are to:

1. identify relevant research and innovation EU-funding programmes for the Alliance
2. develop and implement common actions to encourage research communities of CIVIS which share similar goals and perspectives to combine their effort towards the design of joint-applications for these programmes.

Horizon Europe (HEUR) is the 9th framework programme of the European Union for research and innovation (it follows the H2020 programme). With a budget of 95,5 billion euros for the 2021-2017 period, Horizon Europe is divided in four pillars also reflecting its main priorities:

1. Excellent science
2. Global challenges and industrial European competitiveness
3. Innovative Europe
4. Widening participation and strengthening the European Research Area

The pillars (2) and (3) offer different opportunities to fund research and innovation collaborative projects, within the scope of the 6 Clusters, 5 Missions, Partnerships and under the EIC-Pathfinder. These include several opportunities related to the five CIVIS Hubs themes such as resumed below:

Hub - Health

• Clusters: Health
• Mission Cancer Cluster Climate
• Environment and energy (partly)
• Mission Ensuring soil health and food (partly)
• 11 Partnerships EIC

Hub - Cities, territories and mobilities:

• Cluster Climate, Energy, Mobility Cluster Climate, environment and energy (partly)
• Mission Living in greener cities and ensuring soil health and food EIC

Digital and Technological transformation

• Cluster Digital, Industry, Space
• 10 Partnerships EIC

Climate, environment and energy

• Cluster Food, bioeconomy, natural resources, agriculture and environment
• Cluster Climate, environment and energy
• Mission Adapting to climate change
• Mission Protecting our oceans
• Mission Living in greener cities
• Mission Ensuring soil health and food
• 19 Partnerships EIC

Society, culture, heritage

• Cluster Culture, creativity, inclusive society
• EIC

The aim of the call is to support networking amongst the research community of CIVIS and to contribute to encourage new collaborative projects amongst the academics of the Alliance.

This project can also contribute to reinforce collaborations with the associated African partners of CIVIS, by inviting them to join virtually the conference:

• Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar
• University of the Witwatersrand
• Université Hassan II de Casablanca
• Makerere University
• University of Sfax
• Eduardo Mondlane University

This call will contribute to fund workshops/seminars to support networking activities. The workshop will have to be organised prior to 1 August. Overall, the expected outcomes of this activity are:

• Strengthening mobilities of the academics within the Alliance
• Facilitating the building of consortia within the Alliance
• Strengthening relations with the Associated partners of CIVIS
• Increasing the number of collaborative projects submitted to Horizon Europe that includes three or more CIVIS partner universities
• Strengthening research collaborations within the CIVIS Hubs
• Experimenting new activities to test case studies to be integrated in the outcomes of RIS4CIVIS

The following criteria must be fulfilled

• The submitted project must involve three or more CIVIS partner universities.
• The involvement of academics from an associated partner of CIVIS on the top of these minimum of 3 CIVIS partners, if relevant, is also supported.
• The submitted project must be relevant to one of the Hub of CIVIS: Climate, Environment, Energy; Health; Digital and Technological Transformations; Cities, Territories, Mobilities; Society, Culture, Heritage.
• The submitted project must be related to either one of the six Clusters of Horizon Europe, one of the Horizon Europe partnerships, or one of the EIC calls.
• The project should already target one published call for proposal (for 2022) or one Horizon Europe expected impact (for 2023 and beyond).
  • The calls for 2022 are published: Funding Portal or CIVIS BOX.
  • The calls for 2023-2024 are under preparation. However, all of them will be oriented toward different expected impacts. See CIVIS BOX for overview of the upcoming opportunities.

Selection criteria

• Project objectives and relevance with the objectives of this call
• CIVIS dimension of the project and foreseen consortium
• Relevance with HEUR upcoming and/or published call for proposals
• Scientific excellence

Selection procedures

Each project will be assessed:

• by one member of the related hub, from a University not part of the project or an external reviewer
• by one member of the TF HEUR, from a University not part of the project

If all the universities are involved in the proposal, external reviewers will assess the proposal.

The selection committee will rank the proposals considering the two reviews. It will be composed of:

• The coordinator of CIVIS WP4
• The coordinator of the HEUR Task force and a member of this Task Force
• One representative from the CIVIS coordination team
• The coordinator of RIS4CIVIS

The selected projects will receive funding to organize a workshop (or equivalent) to allow face to face meetings of the researchers, up to €3000 per project. This meeting will have to be organized before 1 August 2022.

CIVIS will only fund the mobility of the visiting universities members. The hosting university cannot request any funds. The involvement of African partners of CIVIS - even if encouraged - cannot be funded. Their participation could then be organised remotely or funded elsewhere.

Each funded project will be supported by the corresponding TF HEUR member from the university which coordinates the project, in order to identify Horizon Europe upcoming opportunities and possible paths towards HEUR submission.

CIVIS will dedicate €30,000 for the whole call.

Eligible costs

• Travel and Subsistence (real costs)

To give potential applicants further details and answer your questions we are pleased to invite you to an online information session about the call for proposals.

• Thursday 9 December 2021
• 12.00-13.00 CET
• On Zoom

Join the meeting

Please submit the completed application online.

Deadline: 28/01/2022

Apply here