Use of EU funds

• Author: Nordenmark Severinsson, Anna; Lerch, Véronique
• Pages: 41-46

Target Group Discussion Paper Children in Alternative Care

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The Child Guarantee can play a significant role in ensuring the funding of measures that

will be aligned with these priorities and with the national strategic policy frameworks

regarding alternative care and family support. It can do so through measures such as: the

exchange of good practice; the piloting of programmes (regarding for example foster care

or leaving care); the development of new services; and the development of systems to

collect and analyse dat a regarding children in care. The Child Guarantee can also play a

significant role in ensuring that reforms and new developments are in line with international

and European human rights frameworks.

Use of EU Funds

The EU Funds under consideration here are the European Social Fund (ESF), the European

Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and the Asylum, Migration and Integration Fund

(AMIF).

Some other EU funding programmes hav e been used to fund projects related to the TG

and might provi de some useful lessons regarding their use and their effectiveness, and

some complementarity could be sought with the main Funds. Two of those programmes

are as follows.

• Rights, Equality and Citizens Programme (DG Justice): Several objectives of

the funds under this programme provide useful hooks for supporting children in

care. It has funded, for instance, some training on care and the project ‘FORUM for

Unaccompanied Minors: transfer of knowledge for professionals to increase foster

care’, coordinated by Fondazione l’Albero della Vita (Italy), which aims to expand

national systems of family-based car e for the reception of unaccompanied migrant

children.

• Horizon 2020: This programme could be used to improve the qualitative data

available on children in alternative care and to carry out research on this TG.

Following criticism of the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) for funding the

construction of new care institutions or the renovation of existing institutions, the

regulation governing the ESIF for 2014-2020 included specifi c protections t o ensure that

funds are used to support deinstitutionalisation.

The central aspect of t he commitment to promoting deinstitutionalisation in the ESIF

regulation takes the form of a so-called ‘ex-ante conditionality’ – a requi rement that must

be met before funds can be disbursed. Linked to the objective of active inclusion, a specific

condition requires MS to show that their national policies to reduce poverty include

‘measures for the shift from institutional to community-based care’, where relevant needs

have been identified. Further guidance from the EC clarifies the scope of ‘relevant needs’

as covering those MS where ‘the shift to community-based care has not yet been

completed’.

For the funding period 2014-2020, the EC identified a need for measures to support the

shift from instituti onal to community-based care in 12 MS: Bulgaria, Croatia, the

Czech Republic, Estoni a, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovaki a,

and Slovenia. In a further 5 MS (Denmark , Ireland, Malta, Portugal, and Spain),

partnership agreements contain a c ommitment to dein stitutionalisation and identify

measures to support th e process (as revealed in FR A’s review of 2014-2020 partnership

agreements between the EC and individual EU countries). The remaining 11 MS do not

specifically ad dress the transition f rom institutional to community -based care in

partnership agreements. This means that they will not use money from the ESIF to support

the process (FRA, 2017).

The European Semester focuses mainly on economic and employment policies, but it has

increasingly issued Country Specific Recommendations in relation to tackling poverty and

social exclusion, i ncluding child poverty. The annual Country Reports prepared by the EC

may, therefore, include further recomm endations relating to deinstitutionalisation. This

was the case in 20 out of 27 Country Reports published in April 2019, which prioritised the