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European Commission Digital

Building a Digital Europe together with the CEF Building Blocks and Horizon 2020 eGovernment Projects

On 9 December 2020, experts from the European Commission presented the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Blocks to eGovernment projects financed under the Horizon 2020 programme.

Visit the CEF Digital site to see how you can get started reusing one or more CEF Building Blocks.

The CEF Building Blocks are, open and reusable, standards-based solutions, which interconnect Europe's varied national I.T. landscapes. Thanks to the international standards they are based on, any system built with them can interconnect with others, so public administrations and companies can easily open up their services across sectors and borders.

The CEF Building Blocks offer basic capabilities, reusable in any European project to facilitate the delivery of digital public services across borders and sectors. Currently, there are eight Building Blocks: Big Data Test Infrastructure, Context Broker, eArchiving, eDelivery, eID, eInvoicing, eSignature and eTranslation.

A Blockchain infrastructure (the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure) will soon become a fully operational Building Block, and the Once Only Principle is a preparatory action under CEF.

H2020 eGovernment projects

Delivering innovative eGovernment solutions and applying the principles put forward in the eGovernment Action Plan and Tallinn Declaration are some of the goals of the projects supported by the EU. By funding research, whether it is putting in place technical solutions or encouraging citizen participation, the EU is bringing down the barriers that currently prevent us from exploiting digital technologies to their full potential.

Under Horizon 2020, the European Commission funded 56 projects on the topic of eGovernment.  All these projects have been working to bring eGovernment closer to the citizen, supporting the modernization of public administrations, by the use of digital tools.

Getting access to standardised and secure tools, which are automatically complying with the EU regulation, is a great way for projects to save time, avoid replication benefit from an emerging pan-European legal and technical infrastructure. The need of CEF Building Blocks looks to increase in the future, and these tools will be essential for public administrations’ transition to the digital era.


The Research Executive Agency (REA), the European Commission’s Directorates-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (CNECT) and Informatics (DIGIT) jointly organised this presentation for assorted project managers from leading EU eGovernment projects.

With a large number of participating project managers, the session showed the value of the CEF Building Blocks for pan-European projects. Questions concerned technical aspects of cross-border interoperability, learn more about the relevant European legislation and how to concretely implement one or more Building Blocks. All this information is provided on the CEF Digital site.

You can find the slides from the session below and are warmly welcome to contact CEF Digital directly or email us to get started reusing the CEF Building Blocks.

See the slides: