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Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) face the ongoing challenge of securing adequate funding for their activities. These can range from organising campaigns and raising awareness, to providing recommendations, evidence and data for policy- and law-making, channelling people’s voice and needs, carrying out studies and projects, as well as providing essential services or humanitarian assistance.

We are constantly confronted with some politicians, decision-makers, stakeholders and part of the general public questioning why NGOs should receive large amounts of money from the EU budget. What they do not know, is that funding to NGOs represents – according to different studies and data of the European Commission – around 3% of the EU annual spending. This is very limited compared to funding allocated to private and public bodies, especially if you consider that this percentage includes humanitarian and development aid, research, and funding to NGOs in social policy areas.

Together with Civil Society Europe, Social Platform welcomes last week adoption of the European Parliament’s Employment Committee’s opinion to the report on the financing of NGOs from the EU budget. This opinion is quite important for us. It acknowledges the essential role social NGOs play in developing, monitoring and implementing EU and national policies, as well as in mediating between people, including the most vulnerable or socially excluded, and public authorities. It calls on the Commission to consider increasing the levels of funding, as social spending has declined in many Member States since the onset of the financial and economic crisis. It recalls that NGOs activities, including the provision of essential services, can only complement and support public authorities in their responsibility to address social problems.

The opinion covers important issues. I will focus on two aspects. It addresses how the projects / grants are evaluated by the European Commission and questions the capacity of NGOs to report about how money is spent. To this purpose, it recommends the Commission to refocus its evaluation systems shifting from short term quantitative evaluations to medium to long-term qualitative impact. None denies that NGOs can strenghten their capacity to report, monitor and evaluate. For NGOs and social enterprises, being able to measure the social impact is useful for improving management control and increasing legitimacy. However, for any organisation, engaging from shifting assessing outputs and participation rates to measuring the impact requires time and resources (to know more, read our position paper on financing social services).

However, the allegation contained in the Employment Committee’s opinion that European monitoring and evaluation systems for NGOs usually rely on self-reporting is quite biased. NGOs funded through EU programmes are indeed subject to the evaluation carried out by the European Commission or other relevant Managing Authorities, very often with the support of external auditors. Having said this, are the Commission’s evaluation systems based on deliverables and outputs the most appropriate to assess the quality and added value of projects or grants? In the social field, are they able to capture essential qualitative aspects, such as the well-being or the empowerment of the people affected by the project / grant?

The second aspect I want to focus on is independence. How do you ensure that NGOs receiving money from any donor or institution remain independent? Is money channelled through EU funding used to implement the right policies for the well-being of people? Medecins sans frontiers thinks it is not. It announced that it will no longer take funds from the European Union and Member States, in opposition to their damaging migration and asylum policies.

To conclude, how money is spent does matter. Not only to ensure sustainability of public budgets, legitimacy and accountability of EU institutions and beneficiaries, but most and foremost to ensure that it serves to implement smart policies that promote people’s well-being.