IJ4EU’s Investigation Support Scheme

• Eligibility Criteria:
  – Applicant organisations must be based in at least two EU member states, or be based in at least one EU member state and one official EU candidate country (Albania, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey or Ukraine).
  – Third-country team members from further afield are welcome to take part, but must be part of teams that fulfil the core geographical criteria described above.
  – Please note that unlike in previous editions of IJ4EU, journalists from the United Kingdom will no longer be treated as equivalent to their counterparts in EU member states. The United Kingdom is now treated the same as any other third country.
  – Teams can comprise any combination of members — including journalists working as part of newsroom structures as well as freelancers.
• Funding type: Programmatic. Applicants to the Investigation Support Scheme can request grants of between €5,000 and €50,000. To ensure that IJ4EU can fund as many high-quality projects as possible — and recognising that cross-border projects don’t necessarily have to involve many countries to have an impact — they encourage applicants to think in terms of the following informal tier system, which is aimed at encouraging a diversity of budget sizes:
  Tier 1: EUR 5,000 to 15,000 – For smaller, highly focused cross-border investigations
  Tier 2: EUR 15,000 to 35,000 – For cross-border investigations requiring substantial resources
  Tier 3: EUR 35,000 to 50,000 – For cross-border projects of exceptional scale and/or complexity.
• Target Countries: EU and Europe
• Application language: EU languages

Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) is a fund for cross-border investigative journalism in the EU that provides grants to teams of journalists or news organisations in Europe investigating topics of public interest. The fund is seeking applications for its Investigation Support Scheme that provides financial support to cross-border journalistic teams working on investigations of public interest in Europe.

Topics
Projects on all topics will be considered. This includes, but is not limited to:

• Corruption, illicit enrichment and financial crime;
• Security, democracy and human rights;
• Environment and climate change;
• Health, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.