NAWA and Poland's International Mobility System: A 2026 Reference for Institutions

Every Erasmus+ coordinator working with Polish partner institutions eventually runs into the name NAWA, the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. It is frequently mentioned alongside Erasmus+ in Poland's internationalization narrative, and it is easy to assume it functions as a Polish equivalent to a national mobility grant scheme for outbound student internships. It does not, and understanding precisely what it does fund, and what it does not, changes how a mobility office should plan around Polish students and Polish partner universities.

This reference page sets out what NAWA is, how it is structured, what its named programmes actually cover, and how its funding scale compares with Poland's Erasmus+ allocation. It is written for Erasmus+ coordinators, international office staff, and government mobility programme officers who need an accurate operating picture rather than a marketing summary, whether they are advising Polish students, hosting them, or building an institutional partnership with a Polish university.

What NAWA Is, and Who It Answers To

The Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange, Narodowa Agencja Wymiany Akademickiej, was established by an act of the Polish parliament dated 7 July 2017 and began operating on 1 October 2017. It reports to Poland's Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Its founding mandate was to coordinate state-level activity around the internationalization of Polish science and higher education, and its creation was partly a policy response to concerns about the emigration of Polish academic and research talent, sometimes referred to as brain drain, and to the underdeveloped international profile of Polish universities relative to peer countries in the region.

NAWA is not a university, an accreditation body, or a scholarship clearinghouse for study-abroad advisers. It is a grant-making agency: it runs competitive calls, individuals and institutions apply, and NAWA disburses funding directly rather than delivering services itself. This structure matters for a foreign counterpart, because there is no single "apply to NAWA" pathway that fits every use case. Each programme has its own eligibility rules, its own applicant type, and in most cases, its own annual call calendar.

NAWA's Programme Portfolio: What It Actually Funds

NAWA operates roughly two dozen named programmes at any given time, and the honest starting point for a mobility office is that the large majority are oriented inward, toward bringing foreign students and researchers to Poland, or toward strengthening Polish institutions' own international standing, rather than outward, toward funding Polish students to go abroad for internships or traineeships. The table below groups the programmes most relevant to institutional planning by direction and audience.

Reading across this table, a clear pattern emerges. Banach NAWA, Poland My First Choice, Polonista NAWA and Ulam NAWA all bring foreign nationals into Poland. Polish Returns and NAWA Chair (a related programme not detailed here) are aimed at academic staff and researchers, not students on placement. PROM funds short, academic-purpose trips measured in days or weeks, closer to a conference grant than an internship placement. STER strengthens doctoral education infrastructure at the institutional level. Only the Strategic Partnerships Programme names internships explicitly as an eligible activity, and even there, the applicant is always the Polish institution, not an individual student, and the funding is a project grant a university competes for, not a personal stipend a student applies to receive.

Does NAWA Fund Student Internships Abroad? An Honest Answer

For a mobility office trying to place NAWA correctly in a funding landscape, the direct answer is: not as an individual grant a Polish student can apply for to complete an internship or traineeship abroad. Research into NAWA's current programme portfolio, drawing on the agency's own English-language programme pages and its 2024 activity report, does not surface a NAWA scheme equivalent in structure to an Erasmus+ traineeship grant, where a student secures a foreign placement and receives a monthly stipend directly tied to that placement.

Where NAWA connects to internships at all, it is at the institutional level, through the Strategic Partnerships Programme, where a Polish university can build a placement exchange into a broader co-funded project with a named foreign partner. That is a meaningfully different mechanism from an individual scholarship: it requires a Polish institution to act as lead applicant, a foreign HEI or research institution to sign a letter of intent as Strategic Partner, and a multi-year project design, not a single student's application. This is a genuinely useful mechanism for a foreign university that wants to formalize a placement relationship with a Polish partner, but it is not a channel a student or a mobility office can point an individual outbound student toward for internship funding.

Given this, the operationally correct answer for a coordinator advising a Polish student who wants a funded internship abroad is the same answer that applies to most EU member states: Erasmus+. For the funding mechanics that actually apply to a Polish student's outbound traineeship, including monthly grant amounts and eligibility, see the related Erasmus+ traineeship allowances country table for 2026.

NAWA and Erasmus+: Scale and Positioning Compared

The Foundation for the Development of the Education System, known by its Polish acronym FRSE, is Poland's Erasmus+ National Agency and administers both study and traineeship mobility for Polish students, including outbound traineeships of 2 to 12 months. Poland's Ministry of Science and Higher Education stated, marking the 20th anniversary of Poland's EU membership in 2024, that approximately 15,000 Polish students go abroad annually through Erasmus+, and that 266,000 Polish students had participated in the programme cumulatively since accession. The Ministry also reported Poland's 2024 Erasmus+ allocation at around EUR 262 million.

Set against NAWA's own reported 2024 budget plan of PLN 263.2 million (executed at 98 percent, per NAWA's 2024 activity report), the scale difference is stark: at typical 2024 exchange rates, NAWA's entire annual budget across all of its programmes, inbound and outbound, individual and institutional, was worth roughly a quarter of Poland's single-year Erasmus+ allocation. NAWA reported 7,093 total beneficiaries across 28 programme calls in 2024 (6,331 individuals and 762 institutions), a figure that spans every NAWA programme combined, not internships specifically, and is smaller than the number of Polish students who go abroad through Erasmus+ in a single year alone.

The practical conclusion for a mobility office is straightforward. Erasmus+, not NAWA, is the structural backbone of Polish outbound student mobility, including internships and traineeships. NAWA operates a materially smaller, more specialized set of programmes concentrated on attracting foreign talent to Poland and on strengthening Polish institutions' international standing at a systemic level. Poland's broader outbound mobility picture, including the country's standing as one of Europe's larger Erasmus+ sending markets, is covered in more depth in Poland's international internship outlook.

How a Foreign University or Host Organisation Engages With NAWA

For institutions on the receiving end of Polish student or researcher interest, three practical entry points are worth knowing.

Strategic Partnerships (STP), for formal institutional co-funding. A foreign university interested in building a durable, funded relationship with a Polish institution, including one that could eventually incorporate internships, should approach it through this programme. The Polish institution applies as lead; the foreign university signs a letter of intent as Strategic Partner and is not itself financed from Polish budget funds. Project co-financing runs up to PLN 2,000,000 over 12 to 24 months, covering activities from staff and student exchange to joint teaching materials and joint degree development.

PROM, for short academic visits. Where the goal is a brief, purpose-specific exchange, a conference presentation, dissertation research, or a summer school, rather than a placement, PROM is the relevant NAWA channel, funding short trips by Polish students, doctoral candidates and staff, as well as incoming visits by foreign guests to Polish institutions.

Study in Poland / Ready, Study, GO! Poland, for recruitment context. NAWA also runs promotional activity aimed at attracting foreign students to Polish institutions under the "Study in Poland" and "Ready, Study, GO! Poland" branding at study.gov.pl. This is not a funding channel but is useful context for understanding NAWA's overall inbound-recruitment orientation, and for institutions building two-way exchange relationships with Poland rather than one-way outbound placement pipelines.

None of these three pathways function as an internship-placement service in the way a specialist mobility operator does. NAWA funds relationships and individual scholarships; it does not vet host organisations, manage documentation for a placement, or provide day-to-day placement support to a student once funding is secured.

The Underlying Polish Student Market

Context on scale is useful for any institution weighing investment in the Polish market. Statistics Poland (GUS) reported 1,280,100 students enrolled in Polish higher education as of 31 December 2024, an increase of 34,900, or 2.8 percent, on the previous year, reversing a period of enrollment decline. Close to two thirds of students (62.8 percent) were enrolled full time. GUS also reported 108,609 foreign students studying in Poland in the 2024/25 academic year and 352 higher education institutions registered in Poland's POL-on system. This is the base from which both NAWA's inbound scholarship programmes and Poland's Erasmus+ outbound cohort are drawn, and it underlines that Poland remains one of the larger student populations in the EU, with a growing, not shrinking, higher-education base.

For institutions building placement pipelines with Polish partner universities or engaging Polish students directly, the Living Profile approach used across the Internship Abroad network gives coordinators a structured, verifiable record of a student's placement readiness that travels with the student regardless of which funding channel, Erasmus+, an institutional grant, or self-funded, ultimately supports the mobility.

For Institutions: Where a Placement Partner Fits

NAWA is a useful reference point for understanding Poland's institutional internationalization strategy, and the Strategic Partnerships Programme is a real mechanism for foreign universities wanting a formal, co-funded relationship with a Polish institution. It is not, however, a substitute for the operational work of sourcing, vetting and documenting individual internship placements for Polish students, which is where Erasmus+ traineeship funding and a structured placement network do the heavy lifting.

Internship Abroad works with mobility offices handling Polish outbound students across its network markets, aligning host vetting and Learning Agreement workflows with the funding mechanics that actually apply, principally Erasmus+ traineeships, so coordinators are not left trying to force a Polish student's mobility into a NAWA channel that was never designed for individual placement funding. Institutions and government mobility programmes evaluating how NAWA, Erasmus+ and a placement network fit together for their Polish cohort can review the Governments page or the Institutions page for the partnership model.

Sources: Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA), Sprawozdanie z działalności NAWA za rok 2024 (NAWA Activity Report 2024), and NAWA English-language programme pages (Banach NAWA, Poland My First Choice, Polonista NAWA, Ulam NAWA, Polish Returns, PROM, Strategic Partnerships Programme), 2024-2026; Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, overview of the Erasmus+ programme for the 20th anniversary of Poland's EU membership, 2024; Foundation for the Development of the Education System (FRSE), Poland's Erasmus+ National Agency, higher education mobility information, 2025; Statistics Poland (GUS), Higher Education in the 2024/2025 Academic Year, released 2025. Figures cited reflect official institutional and government reporting available at the time of writing, July 2026.