Category: Trainings

Organised by the Evaluation Helpdesk on behalf of the European Commission.

This training seminar will be held in Gdansk, Poland, on 2, 3, and 4 July 2025.

Trainers: Thomas Delahais, Andrea Naldini, Elliot Stern, Terry Ward

Programme: Available soon

The 2025 Evaluation Helpdesk Summer School will focus on problems we often see in managing evaluations and on ways of avoiding or mitigating them. The three-day course will start by going over common but harmful practices, getting participants to recognise them and pointing out the issues they can give rise to. Reflections on managing evaluations and ways of ensuring their quality is particularly important at this stage of the cohesion policy programming period, when Managing Authorities are starting to implement their evaluation plans and carry out the first evaluations.

Pitfalls can affect the whole evaluation process and can be interlinked (e.g. poor design can adversely affect the Terms of Reference, which in turn can affect the implementation of the evaluation). The Summer School will use the evaluation process as a backdrop against which the main risks and issues, including both procedural and methodological ones, will be identified and discussed.

Pitfall considered include:

• We published a call for tender but did not get the responses we hoped for
• The evaluator that was awarded the contract now say that they cannot implement the methods proposed because of lack of the necessary data
• We concluded an evaluation, but the findings have been largely ignored

During the Summer School, participants will present their experience of these and other pitfalls and what action they took as a result. The discussion will centre on ways of reacting to the various pitfalls that can arise at each stage of the evaluation process, how to mitigate their consequences and how to anticipate them in the future so that they are avoided.

Ressources: Useful ressources and reading material will be made available here