Pixel International Conferences

The paper outlines the main funding opportunities that the European Union provides in order to foster the international cooperation among institutions in the field of education and research.
The paper starts with an introduction to the Europe 2020 strategy with which the European Union has set five ambitious objectives relate to employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate/energy to be reached by 2020.
Within Europe 2020 strategy the paper presents and describes the main characteristics of the most important funding Programmes that can be interesting for researchers and higher education institutions to finance their researches, their mobility and their career development, Erasmus+ providing funding opportunities in the field of Education, Training, Youth and Sport and Horizon 2020, providing funding opportunities in the field of Research and Innovation.
The paper presents each of the mentioned Programme’s main objectives, funding schemes and budget.
Then issues related to quality project planning are addressed together with an overview of the main quality and assessment criteria used to select successful project proposals.
Finally some examples of initiatives, already funded by the European Commission are provided.

Keywords: European Union, education and research, Programmes;