As the strategy comes to an end, the European Commission is evaluating its implementation.

Consultation activities are taking place in 2019 and 2020 to collect feedback from citizens and stakeholders.

Purpose and scope of the evaluation

The purpose of evaluation is to assess to what extent the strategy translated into effective policies, as well as how it contributed to the implementation of the UN convention for persons with disabilities at the EU level. Drawing from the available evidence, the results will be used as a reference for possible future policy developments after 2020.

The evaluation will assess the effectiveness, efficiency, relevance, coherence, and benefits of the strategy and will cover all eight areas for action identified by the Strategy, as well as its general instruments.

Consultation activities and conclusion of the evaluation

Consultation activities with citizens and key stakeholders are an essential element of the evaluation process. All consultation activities focus on the eight main areas of the European disability strategy and on its general instruments. The aim of these consultations is to gather information and views from key stakeholders.

The preliminary list of stakeholders includes

• organisations representing persons with disabilities
• Commission services
• EU Parliament Committees
• disability experts
• service providers
• organisations of and for elderly people
• representatives of national and regional governments.

The consultations include

• an open online public consultation that will be conducted in the second half of 2019. The consultation will be open to all citizens, run for 12 weeks and be available in all EU languages so as to achieve a high level of participation of all relevant stakeholders, and in particular of persons with disabilities.
• targeted consultations, which include interviews, meetings and questionnaires addressed to a range of selected key stakeholders. Official existing representative stakeholders' fora will be targeted as much as possible and whenever relevant.

The qualitative and quantitative data gathered will be used to form conclusions about the evaluation questions for each evaluation criterion (relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, coherence, and EU added value).

A summary of all consultation activities' results will be included in a synopsis report which will be published by the end of 2019 on the consultation page once all consultation activities are closed.

In 2019 the European Commission has started the process for evaluating the implementation of the European disability strategy. According to the Strategy's evaluation roadmap, the evaluation will end by the first half of 2020. The results will be published in a Staff Working Document.