Creative Europe drives billions in investments and boosts visibility of EU works

Creative Europe has successfully contributed to safeguarding cultural diversity, strengthening competitiveness and empowering the cultural and creative sector as well as the audiovisual sector to cooperate beyond national borders.

These findings are outlined in the report adopted by the Commission evaluating a decade of Creative Europe, the EU's flagship funding programme for culture and media.

On the media side, European films and series supported by the MEDIA strand were significantly more accessible via TV, cinemas and video-on-demand, by factors of 9.5, 6.6 and 3.2 times respectively, compared to similar EU works not supported by MEDIA.

At the same time, the Culture strand of the programme supported over 1,800 projects involving 6,700 organisations and funded almost 500,000 mobility days for artists and culture professionals, helping their works circulate beyond national and linguistic borders.

The Cultural and Creative Sectors Guarantee Facility, implemented together with the European Investment Fund, leveraged almost €2 billion in loans and reduced the shortfall in access to debt finance by up to 30%. Its success paved the way to the launch of an equity instrument for the audiovisual sector - MediaInvest.

In 2021, Creative Europe also started funding high-quality news media projects to promote media independence, pluralism and media literacy.

Going forward, the report highlighted that funding is crucial to continue supporting the media and the cultural and creative sectors' needs to unlock their full potential and to continue adapting to the significant market, technological and other challenges they face, while widening access to a diversity of cultural content across borders.

The report covers the final evaluation of the 2014-2020 programme and the mid-term evaluation of the current programme.

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