The Share Network releases Publication on First Lessons Learned from Monitoring and Evaluation of Community Sponsorship Programmes in Europe
Share's new policy brief provides an overview of community sponsorship evaluations in different European countries and analyses the findings in a comparative perspective, documenting common challenges, opportunities, and good practices across the different sponsorship schemes, providing recommendations on how to make the various programmes more resilient over the long-term.
Community sponsorship has become a reality in Europe with an increasing number of programmes piloted in recent years. Since the development of the various schemes, a number of formative evaluations have been conducted in different European countries looking at programme design and best practices and challenges, whilst also providing stakeholders recommendations for future adaptations of their programmes. Some of the community sponsorship schemes have also begun to develop monitoring tools to assess how well the programmes are performing - facilitating quick interventions and the ability to adapt to new needs.
This summary and policy brief takes into account the findings and recommendations from these formative evaluations and monitoring practices, which were presented at the Share QSN Transnational Roundtable on Refugee Sponsorship Evaluations and the follow up workshop on Monitoring of Community Sponsorship Programmes in 2021. Both events were organised in the context of the SHARE Quality Sponsorship Network (QSN), a programme co-funded by the European Union’s Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund (AMIF) which supports pilot and ad-hoc sponsorship initiatives to develop into sustainable, community-driven programmes.
Looking at the monitoring and evaluation of these programmes in a comparative perspective is useful to document common challenges across the different schemes and begin to establish the good practices which can help make the various models more resilient over the long-term. The evaluations have also allowed an initial assessment of how well these practices and design frameworks work in different contexts and operational settings as well as with different profiles of refugees, sponsors, and hosting communities.