Building an M&E system

The input and support of Member States and Associated Countries to European Partnerships is based on national governance and coordination mechanisms, including national consultation activities, which prioritise participation, ensure resources, relevance, and commitment for the lifetime of the initiatives, and ensures the monitoring and evaluation of the national participation.

For the Biennial Monitoring Report on partnerships the central elements are the Key Impact, Pathways, the common indicators, the country, and partnership fiches. These main elements, necessary for EU level monitoring activities, impose specific data requirements. These data needs will be partly covered by European Commission databases (mainly project level quantitative data about participation in partnerships, data regarding Horizon Europe Key Impact Pathways and data related to common indicators developed by the Expert Group) and by European Partnerships (partnership level data containing KPIs, data for common indicators and data transfer of KICs and co-funded partnerships (project level data)). In addition, success stories and qualitative data about partnerships are to be collected.

These main data sources will be complemented by the Member States and Associated Countries via their country fiches: qualitative data of participation in partnerships, e.g., success stories from national perspective, added value of partnerships, and some qualitative input for the common indicators via partnerships and country fiches. During the preparations of the BMR 2022, in the process of preparing the country fiches, many countries stated, that there is no, or very limited, overview of the investments made in partnerships. This made it difficult for countries to validate the data provided by European Commission and could be an obstacle also for future reports.

This section describes the steps in the BMR process where the action/input is required by countries. Checklists for countries were created (and organised by BMR chapters) for each step where input is essential. These steps are in Chapter 2 (“Contribution of European Partnerships”) and Chapter 3 (“European Partnerships at Country Level”).