External Funding Unit

EFU

General context

One important way for UIC to maintain and develop its rail technical expertise is to carry out technical projects for the benefit of its members.
In this context the major role of the External Funding Unit (EFU) as part of the Finance Department is to support UIC members’ efforts by finding external sources of financing as well as providing financial, administrative and contractual assistance throughout all stages of externally funded projects.

External funds and uic technical expertise

UIC’s worldwide reputation for its rail technical expertise ensures its success in a competitive bidding process, giving access to various external sources of funding through open calls, calls for tenders and framework programmes in Europe and throughout the world. The EFU team completes this advantage by ensuring financial, administrative and legal management as well as reporting issues in compliance with contractual commitments.
EFU’s core expertise focuses on specific issues related to the projects with external financing and can be summarised as follows:

Find alternative sources of financing for technical and research projects;
Provide expertise in mastering the framework for the bidding process (support for technical bid; financial bid preparation; bid submission) so as to ensure the compliance with specific financial and administrative constraints;
Structure and prepare financial and administrative parts of the bidding dossier;
Ensure daily financial and administrative follow-up over the project lifetime as well as financial and management reporting in compliance with contractual commitments;
Provide support for technical reports;
Provide advice on the dissemination framework (structuring, budgeting and implementing of dissemination activities).

Over the recent years, UIC has been committed to the European rail research projects with a strong involvement in the 6th and 7th framework programmes of the European Commission.
This commitment is being pursued within the Horizon 2020 framework programme and the Rail Joint Undertaking Shift2Rail. A number of H2020 projects such as Bodega, NeTIRail, Refinet, Setris in which UIC is involved have already been launched.
Read more about European projects: https://uic.org/europe

Along with European projects, UIC has been involved in the peer review activities for the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) managed by Parsons Brinckerhoff.
Since 2015, UIC has also been providing its advisory expertise to the Korea Railroad Research Institute with a view to establishing R&D roadmap and recommending research priorities for the Korean railways by investigating current environmental regulatory framework of the railway system.
The External Funding Unit (EFU) is available to provide any further information about ongoing projects with external financing schemes.