The European Public Health Association (EUPHA) warmly welcomes the publication of the French non-paper, which expresses serious concern about the removal of operating grants for health civil society organisations in the 2025 EU4Health Work Programme and calls for their urgent reinstatement from 2026 onwards.
EUPHA strongly supports the French initiative, which underscores the essential contribution of health NGOs to European public health, health democracy, and the functioning of the European Health Union.
Operating grants have long served as a cornerstone of structured, stable, and meaningful civil society participation in EU health policymaking. They ensure that patients, users, professionals, and communities have a sustained voice in shaping policies that affect them. As the French non-paper rightly notes, operating grants build permanent capacities, expertise, representation, network coordination, and effective dissemination of EU health policies across Member States, which short-term, project-specific action grants cannot replace.
The non-paper also highlights an important budgetary reality: the cost of operating grants is modest (around €9 million per year) relative to the scale and ambition of EU4Health, while demand for such funding has increased sharply. Structural funding remains essential to ensuring stability, particularly given the recently signed multiannual Framework Partnership Agreements and the positive findings of the mid-term evaluation of EU4Health.
EUPHA is particularly concerned about the risks to the independence and integrity of civil society expertise if structural public funding is withdrawn. In the absence of operating grants, NGOs may become increasingly dependent on private funding, increasing the risk of conflicts of interest and distortions of public health priorities.
The negative consequences of removing operating grants for 2025, disruptions to teams, loss of expertise, weakened participation in EU processes, uneven representation across NGOs, and the undermining of channels that connect EU policies to national and local levels, would represent a significant setback for the EU’s credibility and commitment to civil society engagement.
EUPHA therefore joins France in calling for the immediate reintroduction of structural operating grants from 2026 onwards, and for urgent consideration of transitional solutions for 2025 to protect the continuity and stability of Europe’s health civil society.
A strong and independent civil society is indispensable to safeguarding public health in Europe. Restoring operating grants is essential to ensuring that the EU4Health programme and the broader European Health Union can deliver on their promise for all Europeans.
