The European Commission has launched a one-stop helpdesk on funding possibilities for "motorways of the sea" projects under the Trans-European Network for Transport (TEN-T) programme and the Marco Polo programme. It will also point to other relevant national and European Union funding schemes. The "motorways of the sea" initiative is a TEN-T priority project that aims to promote green, viable, attractive and efficient sea-based transport links integrated through the entire transport chain.

Although EU's strategy for developing a network of Motorways of the Sea is already supported by the TEN-T and Marco Polo programmes, it also benefits from other potential resources, such as the European Investment Bank, Structural Funds, the European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument, the Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance as well as national funding. Before today there was no single guiding source of information on these various programmes, making it difficult for operators who intend to launch a new motorways of the sea project to combine funding from different sources.

With the creation of the one-stop helpdesk – which is backed by the European coordinator of the Motorways of the Sea – the Commission addresses an important bottleneck to starting up new motorways of the sea projects. It will not only help with identifying co-financing options for potential new projects, but also with preparing new funding applications for motorways of the sea projects under the TEN-T and The EU Marco Polo II programme. The service provided at this stage will be web-based, and questions can be sent by e-mail to ec-mos-helpdesk@ec.europa.eu.

The one-stop helpdesk will be jointly managed by the Trans-European Transport Network Executive Agency and the Executive Agency for Competitiveness & Innovation. The one-stop helpdesk initiative will be presented during the Marco Polo European Info Day taking place in the Charlemagne building in Brussels.