Improving urban strategies and policies for migrant integration with data, monitoring systems and other tools for evidence-based policy-making has become practice in many European cities. However, experiences in data collection, analysis and governance arrangements to feed results into municipal decisions vary widely, with many cities lacking access to data. At the same time, existing common EU indicators on migrant integration have not been available on urban-regional level up to now.

Therefore, the Partnership on Inclusion of Migrants and Refugees presents the Action on facilitating evidence-based integration policies in cities. The Partners suggest expanding the Europe-wide knowledge base on migrant integration through an EU-wide core set of continuously updated integration indicators on urban-regional level, test their feasibility and publish first results. Centred on a working group, bringing together European data stakeholder organisations and cities, the Action also explores tools and gathers good practices of evidence-based integration policies on local level, and aims to create new possibilities for know-how transfer and mutual learning ('toolbox').

The Partners are now discussing recommendations for future action focused on: 

• Exploiting new possibilities resulting from the reformed EU regulation on surveys; 
• Developing the ownership of cities in EU-wide data; 
• Improving multi-level communication among data providers/users;
• Enhancing knowledge management and dissemination of EU data and tools;
• Facilitating know-how transfer & exchange between cities.  

A survey has been launched about cities’ efforts at integration data gathering and monitoring. The final meeting of the Partnership will take place in early autumn 2018. 

The leader of this Action is the Migration Policy Group. 

More details on this Action can be found in the Action Plan. To stay up to date, please consult the Partnership website regularly and follow the Urban Agenda for the EU on Twitter @EUUrbanAgenda.  

The Partnership has also produced a short video on this Action: