GE Consulting is a London-based consultancy supporting public institutions, international funders and consulting firms to design, win and deliver EU, UK and donor-funded projects. Services are led by Gaye Erkan, a team leader and project management consultant with over 20 years of experience.
Most projects struggle at the hand-overs: from idea to proposal, from contract to start-up, from activities to results. Support is provided across every stage, so nothing gets lost between them.
Needs analysis, stakeholder consultation and problem definition.
Logical framework, budget, risks and a fundable proposal.
Tender documents, technical offers and contract negotiation.
Team leadership, work plans, procurement and stakeholder relations.
Indicators, reporting to the contracting authority and early warning.
Lessons learned, results reporting and sustainability planning.
Services are provided to ministries, public agencies, international funders and consulting firms, in the UK and internationally.
Leading technical assistance projects from inception to final report.
Research, analysis and proposal writing for FCDO, EBRD, EU and other donor-funded opportunities.
Identifying and analysing UK funding opportunities and their fit.
Practical support under IPA and sectoral operational programmes.
Recent news and writing on project delivery in the public and development sectors.
The climate framework is in place. The harder part is delivery.
Transport decarbonisation, just transition and climate finance in focus.
Five things evaluators look for, from someone who has written and assessed them.
Share a short outline of the project and the support needed.
Get in touchA London-based consultancy helping institutions, funders and consulting firms turn plans into projects that deliver.
GE Consulting Limited is a London-based project management and development consultancy. It was founded by Gaye Erkan, whose work over more than twenty years has focused on the projects that turn public priorities and international funding into real results.
Most of this experience has been gained on EU-funded technical assistance, working alongside ministries, development agencies, municipalities and civil society. Project teams have been led, proposals shaped and the systems that keep programmes on track have been built. Experience shows that good projects rarely fail for lack of ideas. They stall when roles are unclear, planning is thin, or the people delivering them do not have the right tools. That is where GE Consulting focuses.
From London, the consultancy supports UK and international consulting firms with research, analysis and proposal development for FCDO, EBRD, EU and framework opportunities, and carries out research on UK grant funding. Its thematic work spans employment and social policy, civil society, climate action, just transition and regional development, and assignments are taken on in the UK and on mission abroad.
Whether a tender is being prepared or a project is already under way, support can be discussed at any stage.
Get in touchTeam leader, key expert, proposal and advisory services are provided directly to institutions and funders, or as part of a consulting firm’s team, in the UK and internationally.
Leading projects so that activities, budgets and people stay aligned with the results the funder expects.
Suits: technical assistance projects, institutional programmes, multi-partner projects.
Helping public bodies and their partners work more effectively, with processes and documents people actually use.
Suits: ministries, agencies, municipalities and umbrella organisations.
Support for consulting firms and organisations bidding for donor-funded contracts and grants, from first screening of an opportunity to final submission. Recent work includes research, analysis and proposal development support to a range of clients under FCDO framework agreements, including the Global Evaluation and Monitoring Framework Agreement (GEMFA), FCDO’s framework for monitoring, evaluation and learning services, and the Global Development Delivery Framework (GDD), as well as EBRD and other framework contract opportunities.
Suits: UK and international consulting firms, NGOs and public bodies applying to FCDO, EBRD, EU, UN and other funders.
Research on UK grant funding, so that organisations can focus their time on the opportunities that genuinely fit.
Suits: charities, social enterprises, consultancies and organisations new to UK funding.
Practical expertise in how EU-funded programmes work, from the contracting authority’s requirements to day-to-day delivery.
Suits: beneficiary institutions, operating structures and TA contractors.
Designing and running grant schemes, from guidelines for applicants to closure, for programmes ranging from a few dozen to several hundred projects.
Hands-on training that leaves people able to do the work themselves. More than 1,000 staff and beneficiaries have been trained to date.
Share an outline of the project and the gap to be filled. An honest assessment of fit is provided before any engagement.
Get in touchNews on current assignments, events and availability.
GE Consulting is available for team leader, key expert, proposal and advisory assignments on EU, UK and donor-funded projects, from London and on mission where needed.
COP31 preparatory events and discussions held in London are being followed up, with a focus on transport decarbonisation, just transition and climate finance.
Support to the COP31 presentation of the European Union-funded Technical Assistance Project for Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Transport Sector in Türkiye.
The Team Leader role on the Technical Assistance for the Implementation of the Employment, Education and Social Policy Sectoral Operational Programme, held since December 2024, was completed.
Practical notes on designing, winning and delivering publicly funded projects.
What the outcomes of Antalya mean for climate policy, finance and delivery in the UK and Europe.
The climate framework is in place. The harder part is delivery.
What the UK got wrong in the 1980s, what it got right in the power sector, and what it means for Türkiye.
What Türkiye has done so far, and what it still needs to do before COP31.
Where AI genuinely helps proposal teams, where it falls short, and what funders now expect.
Five things evaluators look for, from someone who has written and assessed them.
Two decades of pre-accession funding changed how public projects are planned, funded and managed.
Where grant funding for UK charities comes from, what the end of EU funding means, and lessons from international grant programmes.
Most technical proposals don’t lose because the team is weak. They lose because the evaluators can’t see, quickly enough, that the team understands the job.
Evaluators read many offers for the same tender. Generic paragraphs about the sector stand out for the wrong reasons. Refer to the specific institution, its current situation and the constraints in the terms of reference, and show how they shape your approach.
A good methodology connects each activity to a result and each result to the project purpose. If an evaluator can trace that line on one page, you’ve made their job easier, and they notice.
Listing “delays in beneficiary approvals” is not risk analysis. Explain why it might happen on this project, how you’ll see it coming and what you’ll do about it.
Expert days, activity timing and reporting milestones should fit together. Inconsistencies between the work plan, the methodology and the staffing table are among the easiest points for an evaluator to deduct.
Evaluation committees work through long documents against a grid. Use the grid’s headings, keep paragraphs short and put the key point first. Clarity is not a style choice here; it’s a scoring advantage.
If you’re preparing an offer and want an experienced review before submission, get in touch.
A personal reflection. The views expressed are my own.
Generative AI has quietly become part of how many proposal teams work. It summarises terms of reference, drafts sections and checks consistency in minutes. The question is no longer whether to use it, but how to use it without losing what makes a project proposal convincing: real understanding of the problem and the people it affects.
Funders have moved from silence to clear rules, and the direction is consistent: AI may be used, but responsibility stays with the applicant.
These rules come mostly from research funders. Development donors and procurement bodies vary, and many have no published policy yet. The safe approach is to check each call, terms of reference and contract for specific requirements, and to assume that you are fully accountable for every word submitted.
In my own work on proposals for EU, FCDO, EBRD and other funders, AI tools have proved most useful for the time-consuming groundwork that sits around the core thinking:
Used this way, AI can save days on a single proposal, and that time can go back into what matters most: strategy, partnerships and the quality of the intervention logic.
There is a second side to this. As funders and contracting authorities face growing numbers of applications, AI is increasingly likely to be part of how proposals are handled, from screening for eligibility and summarising content to supporting evaluators. Most funders currently keep scoring and decisions firmly in human hands, and many restrict the use of AI in assessment. But with application numbers rising, the pressure to use AI in processing proposals is growing, and policies are already under review.
This changes what makes a proposal stand out. If many applicants use similar tools to write similar text, and AI then helps summarise or compare what they submit, generic proposals will blur into one another. A summary of ten proposals that all promise “a participatory, results-based approach” tells an evaluator nothing. What survives that process is what is genuinely specific.
That is why originality, and making that originality easy to see, has become one of the most valuable qualities a proposal can have. In practice, that means:
In other words, the more AI is used on both sides of the table, the more the human contribution becomes the competitive advantage: real understanding of the problem, original thinking about the solution, and the experience to make it credible.
The same principles apply across the project cycle. AI can help analyse monitoring data, prepare progress report drafts and summarise stakeholder feedback, but accountability to the funder and the beneficiaries remains human. The organisations that benefit most will be those that treat AI as a tool within good project management, not a replacement for it.
AI makes good proposal teams faster. It does not make a weak proposal strong, and it cannot make a generic one original. If you would like support in building a proposal process that uses AI responsibly, get in touch.
A personal reflection. The views expressed are my own.
Grants remain the lifeblood of much of the UK’s civil society, from small community groups to national charities. Yet 2023 is proving a difficult year: costs and demand are rising, and EU funding that supported many voluntary organisations for decades is coming to an end. Understanding how the landscape is shifting is the first step to using grants well.
UK civil society draws grant funding from two main sources, each under different pressures.
For many voluntary organisations, the biggest change is the loss of EU funding. Between 2014 and 2020, the UK received an average of around £2 billion a year in EU structural funds, much of it through the European Social Fund, which supported employment, skills and social inclusion work by charities and community organisations. In Wales alone, voluntary sector projects under the 2014–2020 programmes supported more than 45,000 people and over 900 social businesses, with EU investment of more than £113 million.
These programmes are now tailing off. Their replacement, the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, will provide £2.6 billion over three years, less than the EU funds it replaces on an annual basis, and is distributed through local authorities. NCVO has warned that people facing the greatest disadvantage will lose essential support if the new fund does not replace EU funding quickly and meaningfully.
Beyond the money, EU programmes brought structures that the sector valued: a partnership principle that gave voluntary organisations a voice in programme design, and technical assistance that helped smaller organisations apply for and manage funding. Whether these survive in the new system matters as much as the size of the budget.
Rising energy, staff and running costs are squeezing organisations at the same time as demand for their services grows. For applicants, this means more competition for each grant and more time spent on applications that do not succeed. For funders, it means hard choices about how to spread limited resources.
Much of my career has been spent designing and managing civil society grant schemes funded by the European Union, including programmes that supported over a hundred civil society projects at a time. As the UK builds its own post-EU funding system, several lessons are worth carrying over:
Many UK funders already work this way. The challenge, as EU funding ends and new programmes are designed, is to make good practice the norm rather than the exception.
For charities and community organisations, the most effective approach is usually to apply less often but better:
GE Consulting supports organisations with UK grants research, from mapping relevant funders to assessing fit and planning applications. If that would help, get in touch.
A personal reflection. The views expressed are my own.
In September 2024, the UK became the first G7 country to stop generating electricity from coal. Behind that milestone lie two very different transitions: one that was barely managed at all, and one that was planned. Working between the UK and Türkiye, I find the contrast between them one of the most useful guides to getting a just transition right.
Since the miners’ strike of 1984–85, more than a quarter of a million British miners have lost their jobs. The closures came fast and with little planning for what would replace them.
The consequences have lasted for decades. Research by Sheffield Hallam University found that between 1981 and 2004 the coal industry lost around 222,000 male jobs, while only about 132,000 new male jobs were created in the same areas. It took twenty to thirty years for job numbers to recover, and many of the new jobs were poorly paid. Much of the unemployment was hidden: large numbers of redundant miners moved onto incapacity benefits and disappeared from the official jobless figures.
Forty years on, the gap is still visible. The State of the Coalfields 2024 report found that former coalfields have just 57 employee jobs for every 100 working-age residents, against a national average of 73. More than half of employed residents work in manual jobs, and hourly earnings are 6–7% below the national average.
The lesson is stark. When a transition is left to happen on its own, the cost is paid by whole communities, over generations.
The end of coal power tells a different story. In 2013, coal still generated 38% of Britain’s electricity. By 2018 this had fallen to 5%, and by 2023 to about 1%. The government set out its intention to close all coal power stations in 2015, giving operators, workers and the grid a clear timeline. On 30 September 2024, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire closed, ending 142 years of coal-fired electricity. Its owner plans to turn the site into a carbon-free technology and energy hub.
A clear end date, alternatives ready to take over and a plan for the site: none of this makes a transition painless, but it makes it far more manageable.
The UK’s current challenge is oil and gas. The closure of the Grangemouth refinery in Scotland in 2025, with around 400 jobs lost, became an early test. The UK and Scottish governments put together a joint support package, including a training guarantee and up to £10 million for skills support to help workers into clean energy jobs.
Even so, Scotland’s Just Transition Commission called it a disorderly closure and a warning of how difficult and expensive a transition becomes when it is handled reactively. A House of Commons committee later described the local employment shock as avoidable. Researchers at Robert Gordon University have warned that job losses in the wider North Sea sector could be equivalent to a Grangemouth closure every two weeks.
The response is now more structured. The government’s North Sea Future Plan, published in November 2025, includes a North Sea Jobs Service to help workers assess their skills, identify career pathways and access training. Whether it delivers will depend on whether clean energy jobs arrive quickly enough, and in the right places.
Türkiye is at an earlier stage, but the parallels are clear. Its coal workforce is small nationally but concentrated in a few regions, such as Zonguldak, Soma and Afşin-Elbistan, where it is central to the local economy. Six lessons from the British experience stand out:
The learning can flow both ways. Türkiye’s experience of running large-scale employment and skills programmes, built over two decades of EU-funded projects, offers practical know-how in delivering support on the ground.
With COP31 taking place in Antalya in November, the UK and Türkiye will both be at the centre of the climate conversation this autumn. Britain’s story shows that ending a high-carbon industry is achievable. It also shows that the people and places affected will remember how it was done long after the last plant closes.
If you’re working on just transition, employment or regional development programmes, in the UK or internationally, get in touch.
A personal reflection, drawing on my work in employment and social policy programmes. The views expressed are my own.
In November, Türkiye will host COP31 in Antalya. Much of the debate will be about emission targets and climate finance. At home, though, the green transition will be judged by a simpler question: what happens to the people whose jobs, skills and communities are affected?
A just transition is about making the shift to a low-carbon economy fair. It means protecting the workers and communities most exposed to change, creating decent new jobs, and sharing both the costs and the benefits of the transition across society.
Since July 2025 this idea has a place in Turkish law. The Climate Law (No. 7552) names just transition among its guiding principles and defines it as policies that include everyone, giving priority to those most likely to be affected, such as children, women, older people and persons with disabilities, while managing employment impacts and creating new jobs.
The foundations are being laid. Alongside the just transition principle, the Climate Law asks the Ministry of National Education and the Council of Higher Education to update curricula to prepare a green workforce. The National Employment Strategy for 2025–2028 places skills for the green and digital transitions among its priorities.
The pressures are real, but uneven. Coal mining employs around 40,000 people, only about 0.2% of the national workforce. In places like Zonguldak, Soma and Afşin-Elbistan, however, coal is the backbone of the local economy, and these jobs pay well above the national average, with strong job security and high union membership. They will not be easy to replace.
The transition also reaches far beyond coal. Since January 2026, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism has been in its definitive phase, putting a price on the carbon in imports of steel, cement, aluminium and fertilisers. For Türkiye, as one of the EU’s major industrial suppliers, that means changes in production methods, skills and jobs in its exporting industries.
Civil society and research institutions are active too, producing regional analyses and guides for coal regions and bringing public bodies, unions and local actors together to discuss the way forward.
Principles in law are a starting point. Turning them into results will require practical steps:
Türkiye already has strong tools for this. Over many years, EU-funded programmes in employment, education and social policy have supported active labour market measures, vocational training and social inclusion across the country. The institutions, procedures and partnerships built through them, with İŞKUR, municipalities, schools, universities and civil society, can now be directed towards the green transition.
In my experience, well-designed grant schemes are particularly useful at this stage. They allow local actors to test new approaches, such as green skills training in coal provinces or employment support for women in emerging sectors, and generate the evidence needed before national programmes are scaled up.
Hosting COP31 gives Türkiye a global platform. A clear and credible approach to just transition, backed by concrete programmes rather than principles alone, would strengthen its voice in Antalya. More importantly, it would help make sure that the move to a low-carbon economy brings the people most affected along with it.
When I started working on EU-funded projects in the early 2000s, terms like “logical framework” and “call for proposals” were new to most institutions in Türkiye. Twenty years later, they are part of everyday public sector language. That shift didn’t happen by accident.
Between 2002 and 2020, Türkiye received around €9.2 billion in EU pre-accession funding. It was the largest beneficiary of the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance (IPA), taking nearly half of the total in the first period (2007–2013) and a quarter in the second (2014–2020).
The money mattered, but so did the conditions attached to it. Every euro came with rules on how projects should be designed, contracted, monitored and reported. Thousands of people in ministries, municipalities, universities and civil society had to learn those rules, and many of them kept using them long after a particular project ended.
A shared language for projects. Project Cycle Management and the logical framework became the common way of thinking about projects. Today a ministry official, a development agency expert and an NGO coordinator can sit at the same table and talk about objectives, results, indicators and assumptions in the same terms. That common language is one of the most underrated legacies of EU funding.
Transparent, competitive grant-making. EU grant schemes introduced a model that was new for many institutions: published guidelines for applicants, open calls, independent assessment of proposals against set criteria, and standard contracts. When Türkiye set up its 26 regional development agencies under Law No. 5449 in 2006, their financial support programmes followed a very similar approach, with dedicated units for programme management and for monitoring and evaluation.
Specialised institutions and units. Managing EU funds required new structures: central contracting and finance units, operating structures for sectoral programmes, and EU project units inside ministries and agencies. These teams built expertise in procurement, financial management and programme management that has spread across the public sector.
A habit of monitoring and reporting. Interim and final reports, indicators, monitoring visits and visibility rules made accountability part of the routine. It wasn’t always popular, but it changed expectations: a project is now expected to show what it achieved, not just what it spent.
A professional community. Perhaps the biggest change is in people. Two decades of EU projects created a generation of Turkish project managers, trainers, evaluators and consultants. Many now work with other funders and in other countries, bringing that experience with them.
It would be misleading to describe this only as a success story. The European Court of Auditors, reviewing EU assistance to Türkiye in 2018, found projects generally well designed and delivering their outputs. In my experience, though, outputs are not the same as lasting change. Three weaknesses stand out:
The funding landscape has changed. The current IPA III period (2021–2027) has a total budget of €14.2 billion, shared among all candidate countries on a “fair share” basis, and other funders such as development banks and climate finance are playing a larger role. Priorities are shifting too, towards the green transition, net zero and resilience.
That makes the project management capacity built over the past twenty years more valuable, not less. The challenge now is to keep the discipline EU funding introduced, while making it lighter, more results-focused and more firmly owned by Turkish institutions themselves.
If your institution or organisation is preparing or delivering a donor-funded project and needs experienced support, get in touch.
On 9 November, Antalya opens COP31. Most of the attention will be on the negotiations. For Türkiye, though, one of the clearest tests of climate ambition is much closer to home: how people and goods move around the country.
Transport produces roughly a sixth of Türkiye’s greenhouse gas emissions, and most of it comes from road traffic, particularly freight. The sector’s emissions roughly tripled between 1990 and 2019, and oil still supplies almost all of the energy it uses. Across the whole economy, emissions rose by 5.3% in 2024 to 584.5 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent.
Transport is also harder to change than a power plant or a steelworks. Its emissions come from millions of vehicles, thousands of operators and dozens of public bodies, from ministries to municipalities. No single policy can fix it.
Over the past two years, Türkiye has put much of the policy architecture together:
The market is moving too: electric vehicles made up around 17% of new car sales in 2025.
Strategies don’t cut emissions; projects do. In more than twenty years on EU-funded projects, including leading the İklimIN climate action project, where we trained stakeholders in 20 provinces and supported 37 grant projects run by municipalities, CSOs and universities, I’ve seen that the hardest part is rarely writing the strategy. It is turning it into a pipeline of well-prepared projects, each with an owner, a budget and a way to measure results. In transport, three gaps stand out.
Local capacity. Much of the practical work, such as bus fleets, cycling infrastructure, parking policy and urban logistics, sits with municipalities. Now that local climate action plans are mandatory, many will need support to turn those plans into fundable transport projects.
Project preparation. International funders want to finance sustainable transport, but they need projects with clear objectives, credible feasibility work and realistic procurement plans. Weak preparation is one of the most common reasons good ideas never reach implementation.
Data and monitoring. With emissions trading and NDC reporting, institutions will need reliable data on transport emissions and on what their projects actually achieve. Without a baseline and good indicators, results are hard to prove and harder to scale.
COP31 will put Türkiye’s climate commitments in front of a global audience. Its most lasting effect, though, may be at home: if the attention it brings turns into well-prepared, well-managed transport projects, the 2035 and 2053 targets become far more credible.
If you’re working on transport or climate projects in Türkiye and need support with project design, management or capacity building, get in touch.
Enquiries are answered within two working days.
GE Consulting Limited
London, United Kingdom