TL;DR: EU-funded projects receive millions of euros in grants supposedly earmarked to support female entrepreneurs, but a large portion of that money never reaches the women it is meant to serve. Instead, it circulates among the same established consortiums and consultants, while actual female founders are routinely asked to contribute their expertise for free. The math is ugly, and someone needs to say it out loud.
A project manager from a EU-funded initiative called Epic-X reached out to me yesterday.
Nothing unusual about that. I get these emails constantly. But this one finally pushed me over the edge, because I have been watching this pattern repeat itself for years and almost nobody is talking about what is actually going on here.
So let’s talk about it.
First, Some Background
A few months ago, I wrote a piece for Sifted titled Why is applying for EU funding such a nightmare? where I described the application process, the evaluation chaos, and the consortium trap that keeps startups locked out of meaningful EU money.
That article was about bureaucratic dysfunction.
This one is about something worse.
This one is about exploitation dressed up as support.
We Built Something Europe Said It Wanted
When my team started building Fe/male Switch, the world’s only startup game for women, we applied for Dutch government funding.
We were denied. The reason? We would never be able to build something that ambitious within the allocated timeframe and budget.
So we built it anyway.
The platform now runs almost entirely on its own. It is AI-automated. The infrastructure is pretty neat. It is a nonprofit, so it is free, and I absorb the costs.
And over the years, across multiple grant applications, Europe has funded our work to support female entrepreneurs exactly zero times.
Zero.
Not because the project lacked merit. We built something that did not exist anywhere else in the world. But Europe does not fund things that have no precedent. Europe funds things that look like things that already worked.
That is not support for innovation. That is a photocopy machine calling itself a creative studio.
The Consortium Trap, Revisited
After the direct grant applications failed, we looked at consortium-based funding, which is where the real EU money sits.
The consortium model sounds reasonable on paper. Multiple organisations from different EU countries collaborate on a shared project. Everyone brings expertise. The funding flows accordingly.
Here is what it looks like in practice.
It is an arranged marriage between strangers who have never worked together, forced into a legal structure, and expected to produce meaningful results on a schedule determined by people who have never built anything.
We were invited into a project once; that project had an established leader. We wrote an application and….were rejected because the technical partner, which was us, was “just a startup.”
Other times, we found that every existing consortium was closed. The same organisations cycle through the same programs, decade after decade, because eligibility rules require at least five years of experience within a specific program to create or lead a new one.
You cannot join if there is no seat. You cannot create a seat if you lack experience. And the people holding seats have no incentive to leave.
I wrote in my Sifted article that this smells like nepotism. I stand by that.
Then the Emails Start Coming
Here is where the story shifts from frustrating to genuinely enraging.
After years of being told we were not good enough to receive EU funding, I started receiving emails from EU-funded projects.
The emails all share the same structure. They say something like: we have heard great things about your work. Let us connect. Let us collaborate.
And underneath every single one of those emails is the same unspoken expectation: do this for free.
These are projects sitting on millions of euros. And they want me, a female entrepreneur they have specifically identified as knowledgeable and credible, to provide workshops, talks, expertise, and content without compensation.
Let that sit for a moment.
The Epic-X Email That Broke the Silence
The email last week was from Epic-X Initiative, a European project that received two million euros in funding, partly to support female entrepreneurs.
They wanted me to run a workshop.
I asked one question: is there a budget allocated for this, or are you looking for a free collaboration?
The answer: at this stage, we are not planning to offer compensation for the workshop.
So I said it directly: This is yet another EU-funded project that is supposed to help female entrepreneurs, but instead exploits them.
The response was swift. They pushed back. They explained that they give up to 60,000 euros to each startup through cascade funding.
Here is the part I want you to read carefully.
The Math They Do Not Want You to Do
Out of that 60,000 euros, startups are required to allocate a minimum of 20,000 euros, which is one third of the total, to consultants.
Those consultants are pre-selected by Epic-X. The startup has no say in who they are.
I have been through enough of these programs and accelerators to know that those consultants, with very few exceptions, have backgrounds that have nothing to do with building a startup in the current environment. They do not understand product development cycles, AI-accelerated workflows, or bootstrap economics. Many have never built anything from scratch.
So let us do the math.
The project has two million euros. They say 1.2 million goes to startups, at 60,000 per startup. That is 20 startups.
Out of 60,000 per startup, at least 20,000 goes to consultants. That is 400,000 euros in total flowing to consultant firms chosen by the consortium, not by the startups those consultants are supposedly serving.
Which means the startups receive, at most, 800,000 euros of the 1.2 million announced.
And the remaining 800,000 euros from the original two million budget? It stays with the consortium. For coordination. For dissemination. For reports. For workshops.
Except, as the email confirmed, they are not paying for the workshops. They are asking female entrepreneurs like me to provide those workshops for free.
I asked my AI to dive into the documentation because I don’t feel like going through that pile of fluff myself. The documentation says a few interesting things about those consultant fees. Startups receive 15 to 20 hours of consultation as part of the package. At 20,000 euros for 20 hours, that is 1,000 euros per hour going to consultants.
Meanwhile, I am asked to prepare and deliver a workshop for zero euros.
That is the system. That is what supporting female entrepreneurs looks like in practice.
What Actually Gets Funded
Over the years, I have dug into the outputs of many EU-funded projects that got millions of euros in funding because I needed to understand what was so much better than what we were building.
What I found, repeatedly, was PowerPoint presentations and workshop series. Generic mentorship from people who have never taken a startup from idea to market. Reports written for evaluators who will never build anything either.
One project I reviewed had received over 200,000 euros to build an online course for female entrepreneurs. The final output was a handful of Canva presentations and a few quizzes. Work that my AI system can build in a few hours.
The rest of the budget went to internal meetings, reporting, and what EU grant frameworks call “dissemination activities.”
AI can do all of this, and it does it for a lot less than millions of euros.
The Structural Problem Nobody Wants to Name
This is not a story about one bad project. It is a story about a structural incentive problem baked into the way EU funding for female entrepreneurship works.
The organisations that receive funding are not evaluated on whether female entrepreneurs actually succeeded as a result of their work. They are evaluated on deliverables: events held, workshops delivered, reports submitted, hours logged.
So the path of least resistance is to run the numbers, fill in the forms, and find willing women to do the actual work without paying them.
And because female entrepreneurs have been socialised, often, to be helpful and available and grateful for visibility, they say yes.
I was once of those a few years back. I was eager to help and work for free.
So I am not criticising the women who say yes. I understand the calculation. Sometimes exposure matters. Sometimes you want the connection. Sometimes you are too tired to fight.
But I am naming the system that exploits that calculation.
The Question Every Founder Should Ask
Before you agree to speak at, collaborate with, or contribute to any EU-funded initiative, ask one question: is there a budget for my time?
If the answer is no, or if it is wrapped in language about “exposure” or “community contribution,” then you are looking at an organisation that received public money to do a job, and is asking you to do that job for free.
That is not collaboration. That is outsourcing on someone else’s grant.
And if you are a policymaker or a grant evaluator reading this, here is what I want you to consider. The current system rewards the organisations that are best at writing applications, not the ones that are best at actually supporting women in building businesses.
Fe/male Switch was built without a single euro of EU funding. It serves thousands of users. It runs on sophisticated workflows and automations. It is one of a kind.
Europe said it did not want it.
Ask yourself why.
Next Steps
If you are a founder navigating EU funding, start with my Sifted piece on why the application process is a nightmare. Then come back here and read this one again.
Know the system before you walk into it. Know when someone is trying to extract value from you under the cover of mission-driven language.
And the next time a EU-funded project asks you to work for free, ask them to send you their budget breakdown first.
