BrainGain.Expert lets a single donor grant work on both sides of the EU border: it pays experienced professionals who live in Europe to strengthen businesses in fragile and recovering economies. European donors are increasingly asked to choose between supporting their own citizens and helping countries beyond the EU. Our model is built so that they do not have to.
A dilemma every foundation knows
This autumn, two requests compete for the same budget on the board table of a European foundation. The first is a program for small businesses in Ukraine or the Western Balkans. The second supports people at home: university-educated professionals who cannot find work that matches their qualifications.
Not long ago, both requests would have passed. Today budgets are shrinking, societies inside the EU are under strain, and the argument "help your own first" grows louder. The board postpones the external program.
But what if the choice is false? What if the same grant could bring a European expert back to meaningful work and, at the same time, help a business in a fragile economy get back on its feet? The choice between helping at home and helping abroad is a false one.
The European paradox: the education is there, the matching work is not
At first glance, Europe's university graduates are doing well. In 2025, unemployment among people with higher education stood at 3.6%, against 6.0% for the EU as a whole, according to Eurostat data. The average hides three problems.
- Unused capacity: count everyone who wants more work than they have, including part-timers who want more hours and people ready to work but no longer searching, and the EU figure rises to 11% of the extended labor force (second quarter of 2026).
- Work below qualification: in 2024, 21% of employed university graduates in the EU worked in jobs below their level of education, according to Eurostat. Among citizens of countries outside the EU, the share was close to 40% in 2021. These are engineers, financiers, managers and scientists who work but use only part of what they know.
- A harder start for graduates: in 2024, only 84.9% of recent university graduates in the EU were in work. In Italy and France, more than one in five were not, and in Greece the employment rate was just 72.7%, according to Eurostat data reported by Euronews. Even the elite feel it: at the world's top 15 business schools, the share of MBA graduates who accepted a job offer within three months fell by six percentage points in 2024, to 84%, according to The Economist.
For the economy, this is a hidden loss. Europe has invested years and significant public money in educating these people, and their expertise sits idle.
Aid beyond the EU is shrinking
At the same time, attitudes to helping other countries are changing. In 2025, official development assistance from members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee fell by 23.1% in real terms, to 174.3 billion US dollars. It was the largest annual contraction in the history of ODA, according to the OECD's preliminary data.
The cuts reached Europe too. Germany reduced its aid by 17.4%, France by 10.9% and the United Kingdom by 10.8%. Of 34 donor countries, 26 cut their budgets. The OECD expects a further decline of 5.8% in 2026, The New Humanitarian reports.
The reasons are clear. Defense spending is rising, budgets are under pressure, and voters increasingly ask why money goes abroad when there are problems at home. Carsten Staur, chair of the OECD Development Assistance Committee, has argued that donors need a new story for development aid.
For foundations and corporate donors, the conclusion is simple: programs outside the EU are getting harder to defend before boards, shareholders and the public.
“Boards rarely turn down a program abroad because they stopped caring. They turn it down because they cannot explain it at home. We give donors a story that holds true on both sides of the border: the same grant brings a European professional back to work at their level and helps a business abroad stay open. Donors should not have to choose between their own people and their neighbors.”
Kateryna Nadtochii, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, BrainGain.Expert
Money for skills and jobs inside the EU is there
Inside the European Union, funding for skills, employment and knowledge is substantial. Three of the largest programs in the EU budget for 2021 to 2027 alone:
- European Social Fund Plus (ESF+): 99.3 billion euros for employment, skills and social inclusion.
- Horizon Europe: 93.5 billion euros for research and innovation, after the 2024 revision.
- Erasmus+: 26.2 billion euros for education, training and mobility.
Demand for this money exceeds supply. Funding every high-quality Horizon Europe proposal submitted between 2021 and 2024 would have required another 81.8 billion euros, almost double the amount actually awarded, according to the European Commission's interim evaluation of the program.
One more detail from the OECD statistics. The money donor countries spend on refugees inside their own borders formally counts as development assistance: 23 billion US dollars in 2025. The line between "helping our own" and "helping others" is already blurred. It simply does not yet benefit the economies those people left.
One grant, two results
BrainGain.Expert is designed to remove this false choice. Our Fellows include professionals who live in Europe: Europeans who want work with real scale, and specialists who moved to the EU and work below their level. Ukrainian refugees abroad alone number 5.76 million, according to UNHCR, and most of them live in Europe.
When a donor supports a BrainGain.Expert program, the money pays for these people's time. The work is done remotely, from Milan, Berlin or Warsaw, and the result appears in a business in Ukraine, then in the Western Balkans and other fragile economies. We described the gap this closes in People need people: why we built BrainGain.Expert, and how the first program works in Recovery starts inside the company: Program 01 in Ukraine.
Nobody should have to move for knowledge to work where it is needed most.
Our hub in Berlin and our team in Split and Milan work with European universities, companies and communities, and the EU's neighbors become stronger and more stable partners and markets.
Brain gain instead of brain drain
We call this brain gain instead of brain drain. The donor gets a measurable result on both sides of the border: specialists in the EU working at their level, and roles and capabilities retained in partner companies, confirmed by independent evaluation. We assess our results independently and publish them once a year in aggregate form, including what did not work.
Foundations and companies can support a specific program with a grant or sponsorship and move it up our priority list, technology partners can contribute licenses and cloud and AI credits to the Resource Pool, and private donors can give to the BrainGain.Expert Foundation. The foundation is being registered; until then, donations are received through a fiscal host. Details are on our partner page.