“Enhancing the impact through trial-and-adopt impact evaluations and data ecosystem enhancements” – call for volunteers

“Enhancing the impact through trial-and-adopt impact evaluations and data ecosystem enhancements” – call for volunteers

The project “Enhancing the Impact of European Regional Development Fund and Cohesion Fund Operations through Trial-and-Adopt Impact Evaluations and Data Ecosystem Enhancements” (trial and adopt) is a newly established partnership between the European Commission and the World Bank to:

DG REGIO and the World Bank are looking for projects funded by the ERDF and CF that are interested in collaborating to embed trial-and-adopt impact evaluation pilots in their roll-out and enhance their monitoring data systems.

Interested managing and implementing authorities or beneficiaries (in agreement with the managing authority) can submit their expression of interest (EoI) through the application form on this THIS LINK.

The deadline to apply is on Tuesday the 25 March 2025, 18:00 CET!

For additional information, see below as well as the document here.

Dedicated information sessions are available upon request to the World Bank / European Commission.

Additional details

The call is open to all ERDF and CF projects targeting, for example, individuals or households and addressing priority policy areas such as green transition (energy efficiency), mobility, and services for people (including health, education, and skills). Each Member State is welcome to propose one or several projects for the workshop. Projects targeting firms can refer to the call under the complementary private sector engagement The European Regional Competitiveness Policy Lab Here. (Please note that the two calls have different opening and closing dates.)

Following the call for expression of interest, up to 8 projects will be invited to a one-week workshop to design a trial-and-adopt impact evaluation strategy. The workshop is expected to take place from May 19 to May 23, 2025. The workshop’s objective will be to train selected ERDF / CF programme management and monitoring and evaluation teams on methodologies to design and implement impact evaluations, provide the latest actionable evidence in the priority policy area, and develop a prospective trial-and-adopt impact evaluation strategy to be embedded in future programme implementation. The impact evaluations may test multiple interventions, delivery modalities, design features, and targeting mechanisms to identify effective strategies that increase project impact. The impact evaluations will include a measurement framework that captures outcomes along the theory of change, using existing data systems and proposed enhancements. For instance, results on short-term impacts or intermediate outcomes can help steer policy decisions and encourage programme adjustments to boost medium to long-term effects. Additionally, during the workshop, teams will discuss constraints and inefficiencies in their current data systems and brainstorm options for automating and streamlining data systems to generate just-in-time evidence to monitor project outcomes and measure impact.

For each project, the delegation for the workshop is expected to include a representative from the managing authority, the project manager/coordinator or equivalent, 1 technical staff member with in-depth knowledge of the project's design and implementation, and 1 technical staff member responsible for monitoring data systems.  Partners (such as DG EMPL, DG EAC or DG REFORM), World Bank staff, researchers, and other technical experts will also participate.

Following the workshop, up to 4 projects will receive dedicated technical support through March 2026 to prepare and generate full-fledged design concept notes that outline the modalities through which Member States could embed impact evaluations in the project cycle. For those selected pilots, the WB-DIME will assemble an impact evaluation team led by a principal investigator and with a field coordinator and a research assistant. The impact evaluation research teams will work closely with Member States to provide technical support, co-produce the impact evaluation designs, and ensure that the approach defined through the collaboration is of high quality and policy relevance.

In addition, these trial-and-adopt impact evaluations may be complemented by data ecosystem assessments where projects will be selected for dedicated technical to identify potential enhancements to the data used to monitor project impacts. This would include a review of existing data with potential linkages to project impacts, such as (i) micro-level administrative data (e.g. employment, social security, tax, primary care, housing, etc.), (ii) geo-referenced data, (iii) micro-level survey data, and (iv) data collected from digital and mobile technologies. The assessment will explore how existing data could be leveraged to track outcomes over time and efficiently document intervention impacts, in accordance with the applicable personal data protection regulations under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).