Scale and lag
How much money, and when the public can see it
Measure: commitments, each recipient's allocated share. Larger is further right. Source: ; report, Rankings.
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The Financial Transparency System (FTS) lists EU budget commitments that the Commission manages directly, and the first level of indirect management. Recipients that declared themselves NGOs received in the years covered.
Anyone can tick the NGO box.
The report checked the largest flagged recipients against the legal definition. bodies holding fail it, mainly Erasmus+ national agencies, research institutes and state-owned bodies.
The reviewed NGO set received . Humanitarian aid takes the largest share; research and innovation the smallest.
FTS publishes a year only after it closes.
The largest channel is missing. Member states manage most EU money for NGOs together with the Commission, and FTS does not publish it.
Top 10
Humanitarian NGOs lead the ranking
Ranked by commitments, each recipient's allocated share. Longer bars are larger. Source: ; report, Rankings.
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The tabs above the chart switch between the report's four rankings.
The thin hatched bars are consortium money that FTS books on one partner's row, with zero on the partners' rows. They sit apart from the allocated share because the recipient's part of them is unknown.
The tick marks show estimated payments to date on the same commitments.
National affiliates of one network appear as separate legal entities.
Concentration
A few recipients hold a large share
Filter the records to see who receives the most under any combination of year, programme, management mode and recipient type.
Higher means the largest recipients hold more of the money. The horizontal axis counts recipients on a log scale. Source: ; our calculation.
Commitments, allocated share. Source: .
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Profiles
What the top 10 do, and how much they depend on the EU
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Foundations and affiliations
Links to private foundations, parties and unions
Each mark is one sourced link. The link types are separate findings; one does not imply another. EU commitments are allocated shares, all years covered. Source: cited per row.
Advocacy
Who decided that EU money would fund advocacy?
Calls for proposals can invite policy work. Recipients can propose lobbying in their work plans. Press reports and think tanks make allegations. The evidence for each differs.
What changed afterwards
Disclosure gaps
What the records leave out, and what is promised
Reforms and deadlines
Data quality in the ledger
Findings
What the evidence establishes, and what it cannot
Established
Cannot be verified
Records that would close each gap
Method and sources
How to check this page
Measures
Evidence classes
Each quoted finding carries the class of its evidence. The key groups the finer labels under the report's five classes.
Data
Every figure on this page comes from the research report and its database of funding records. Both are built from the European Commission's Financial Transparency System yearly datasets, listed under sources. Each figure was checked against the database before publication.
Sources cited on this page
Illustrations
Watercolour illustrations after openly licensed photographs. They are illustration, not data.