The European Commission presented its proposal to set up a new Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived. It will count wiht a budget of €2.5 billion for the Fund during the period 2014-2020. Member States would be responsible for paying 15% of the costs of their national programmes, with the remaining 85% coming from the Fund.

A new Fund for European Aid to the Most Deprived was proposed by the European Commission with the aim at supporting Member State schemes providing food to the most deprived people and clothing and other essential goods to homeless people and materially-deprived children. The proposal now has to be approved by the European Parliament and the European Union's Council of Ministers. Recently, €500 million budget were made available for the most deprived in the EU in 2013.

The new Fund would be used by national authorities to either purchase food or goods and make them available to the partner organisations or provide the partner organisations themselves with funding to do so. The proposal also foresees the possibility to use food stored in intervention stocks, if there are any. Partner organisations, often non-governmental, would be responsible for delivering the food or goods to the most deprived persons.

There are 25.4 million children at risk of poverty or social exclusion in the EU. And, out of the 116 million people in the EU who are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, about 40 million are suffering from severe material deprivation. The Europe 2020 Strategy commits the EU to reducing the number of people in or at risk of poverty by at least 20 million. The EU's main instrument to support employability, fight poverty and promote social inclusion is and will remain the European Social Fund (ESF). Yet some of the most vulnerable citizens suffering from extreme forms of poverty are too far away from the labour market to benefit from the social inclusion measures of the European Social Fund.