Increasing the Participation of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Employment

IES worked for MigrationWork to support the European Commission’s learning network, IMPART (Increasing the Participation of Migrants and Ethnic Minorities in Employment).

IMPART aims to help the European Commission understand how ESF funding can be used most effectively to increase the participation of migrants and ethnic minorities in employment. ESF has already supported many projects in this area, but IMPART goes beyond identifying good practice to ask: how can we ensure that good practice projects will be fully implemented and mainstreamed?

To examine this question, the network of 12 EU partners developed three benchmarks, each of which listed factors which made it more or less likely that a project would continue to have long-term impact. Initial sets of these critical factors were identified by analysing the record of ESF-funded work in this field over the previous decade. Experts from different countries then worked together to develop them into the benchmarks.

Using a peer review method with these benchmarks, the work focused on three themes:

  1. validating migrant competences
  2. fostering the development of anti-discrimination skills
  3. integrated territorial approaches.

IES and MigrationWork played a key role in producing the benchmarking toolkit for the peer reviews and in facilitating (and reporting on) several successful peer reviews across Europe. This project ran from 2009 – 2012.