Council Decision 2008/381/EC establishing the EMN specifies that an evaluation of the development of the network should be carried out within three years of the Decision. The external and independent evaluation, which took place during the first half of 2011, was assigned by the European Commission’s DG Home Affairs to the Centre for Strategy & Evaluation Services (CSES).

The evaluation examined the following key questions:

- Is the EMN achieving its objectives (as defined in the Council Decision)?
- How well is the EMN (structure, budget, etc.) functioning?
- How might the EMN further contribute to a more effective use of existing information sources and networks to ensure the availability of comparable data on migration issues with a view to better informing policy choices (in accordance with Section 6.1.3 of the Stockholm Programme)?
- Should the Council Decision setting up the EMN be amended? To what extent?

Different actions were carried out:

• Workshops: Two stakeholder workshops were organized in Brussels to discuss key issues of the evaluation. The first workshop, which took place on 9 February 2011, brought together DG Home, CSES and 15 National Contact Points.
• Survey: A questionnaire was made available online and all key stakeholders were invited to complete it to make an input to the evaluation. A relatively high number of survey responses were obtained from Belgian respondents.
• Interviews: Face to face and telephone interviews were undertaken to investigate key issues in greater depth. The Belgian National Contact Point participated in 2 face to face interviews.
• Peer Review: A sample of EMN outputs (including reports, studies, ad hoc queries) was reviewed by an expert panel to assess their quality and usefulness.

An interim report was drafted in April 2011 and preliminary findings were presented to the Steering Board on 13 May 2011.

A final report was released in November 2011. The results of the evaluation are used to prepare a Commission report on the development of the EMN.