The Diplomat
The Council of Ministers yesterday authorized the granting of a credit supplement in the budget of the autonomous body Spanish Service for the Internationalization of Education (SEPIE), for an amount of almost 15.5 million euros, with the purpose of completing the co-financing of the Erasmus+ Program.
SEPIE is the Spanish National Agency for the Erasmus+ program of the European Union (EU) in the field of education and training and, as such, its function is, among others, the management of national co-financing for the Erasmus+ program. together with the EU’s own financing, the sum of which constitutes the total subsidy.
In this sense, national co-financing is intended to complement the amount of EU funds allocated by the European Commission to SEPIE to finance higher education mobility projects in our country, forming a single budget, although payments are made differentiated way.
With this national co-financing, the aim is to cover a greater number of mobilities than could be financed solely with funds received from the EU, and, in addition, to improve the amount of student aid.
In the ‘Erasmus+ Program Guide’ for the 2024 call, two important innovations are introduced that directly impact the cost of mobility in general, and for students in particular. These are changes in the groups of countries determined by the cost of living that determines the amount of aid, and the granting of travel aid to all students, and not only those from the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands, as had been happening in calls from previous years.
As a consequence of the implementation of these new developments and the objective of maintaining the volume of aid for mobility activities of the 2023 call, co-financing needs are generated that, according to the calculation details that appear in the report of the file, amount to 64,884,280 euros.
The allocation of credits allocated in the General Budgets for the year 2023, extended to 2024, for the ‘National co-financing of the Erasmus+ Program’ amounts to 38 million euros. In addition, a credit generation file has been processed for the amount of 11,439,159.76 euros, which increased said funds.
Therefore, it was necessary to cover the remaining amount, that is, 15,445,120.24 euros. For this reason, the SEPIE, due to the non-postponable nature of the scholarships and the impossibility of financing the budget modification through other alternative means, requested the Council of Ministers for authorization to process a credit supplement file for this amount, financed with the part of the remaining treasury that at the end of the previous year was not applied to the budget of this organization.
