Evaluation of the pilot action of EU aid volunteers. Final report

The EU Aid Volunteers programme, established through Regulation 375/2014, provides the opportunity for European volunteers to come together to support and complement Humanitarian Aid in third countries by volunteering through European organisations and hosted in organisations based in third countries. The first step towards the development of the EUAV took place in 2008 when the legal basis for a European Voluntary Humanitarian Aid Corps was established through Article 214 (5) TFEU. Following the adoption of the establishing Regulation on 3 April 2014, DG ECHO must now draft Delegated and Implementing Acts to establish standards and procedures covering identification, selection, preparation, management and deployment of EU Aid Volunteers to support Humanitarian Aid operations in third countries in accordance with Article 9 of the Regulation.

The EUAV Pilot Action ran from 2011 to 2014 in three phases and had the purpose of guiding the development of the Regulation to establish the initiative and informing the development of standards and systems around specific dimensions (training, certification mechanism, deployment set-up, database) of the future scheme. The details of the latter would be further elaborated in Implementing and Delegated Acts. The EUAV Pilot Action provided the opportunity for partner organisations to shape the future programme. This also increased the ‘buy-in’ of these organisations into the scheme. Twelve pilot projects were funded under the action and through these 289 volunteers were deployed to 148 hosting organisations in different third countries.The report publishes the results of the assessment regarding the EU Aid Volunteers programme. This evaluation aimed:

+ To evaluate the EUAV Pilot Action in order to provide an assessment of its relevance, coherence / complementarity, EU added value, efficiency, sustainability and effectiveness;

+ To gather lessons learnt on why some aspects of the pilot projects did not work so well, and on this basis, to provide inputs for Delegated Acts (more general principles) and Implementing Acts (processes to follow, e.g. recruitment process, deployment, etc.).

In addition to the evaluation, the team also proposed a monitoring and evaluation framework to help the European Commission to monitor the progress of the future EUAV.