“The fund aims to inspire evidence-based policies related to youth.”
Mathieu Valdenaire, Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse
Fonds d’expérime- ntation pour la jeunesse (Experimental Fund for Youth)
Case Study
Impact Measurem- ent
Resources
Location in government
National government
Where it is based
Paris, France
Mission statement
“The Fonds d’experimentation pour la jeunesse is designed to promote student success and improve the social and professional integration of young people under 25 years of age.”
Annual spend
£37.8 million (2013)1 (£30.8m from government, £7m from other sources)
Size of team
12
Example of impact
The Experimental Fund for Youth has supported more than 554 projects and experiments, which have served an estimated 498,000 young people.2
Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse, or the Experimental Fund for Youth, helps the French Government understand which services improve young people’s educational achievement and social and professional integration. Having funded 554 experimental projects and 295 evaluations since 2008, the Fund is demonstrating the value of applying rigorous methodologies, such as randomised controlled trials (RCTs), to assessing policy impact.
What it does
The Fund supports the development of new experiments to test youth service interventions. Support from the Fund partly covers the cost of developing new experiments, whilst delivery and operational costs are covered by the organization providing the intervention. Each experimental project is evaluated by an independent evaluation team.
Between 2009 and 2013, the Experimental Fund for Youth ran 16 calls for proposals and received more than 1,700 applications. Each call for proposals is focused on a specific youth-related theme, such as reducing school drop-out rates.
Current evaluations include studying the impacts of providing young people with a driving license at reduced cost to improve their job opportunities and exploring whether volunteering increases young people’s chances of finding a job.
Interesting features
- Impact measurement: The central feature of the Experimental Fund for Youth is its rigorous approach to impact measurement, undertaking RCTs wherever possible to test the effectiveness of different interventions.
- Resources: Whilst the majority of funding comes from government, the fund was designed to be endowed with both contributions from the state as well private organisations. A result of this is that the fund has attracted significant private financial contributions of around £35 million to date, both from business and philanthropic organisations.3
Learn more
Read our full case study on Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse (Experimental Fund for Youth) in the i-teams report.
If you liked Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse (Experimental Fund for Youth) you may also be interested in
Investing in Innovation Fund (i3)
Behavioural Insights Team
NYC Center for Economic Opportunity
Website
www.experimentation.jeunes.gouv.fr
Share via
Footnotes
- Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, May 2014, conversion: (€) 0.822143 to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from: http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/. The total budget is EUR 230 million euros (£189.1m) across 5 years; we have taken an average for each year
- Presentation by Mathieu Valdenaire, former Head of Evaluation and Results Dissemination Unit, Experimental Fund for Youth Direction de la Jeunesse, de l’Education Populaire et de la Vie Associative-Fonds d’expérimentation pour la jeunesse) at the International Workshop “Evidence-based Innovation: the Role of Evaluation and Social Experiments” Barcelona, 26 September 2026
- Confirmed in email correspondence with Nesta, May 2014, conversion: (€) 0.822143 to £1, as exchange rate on 21/01/2013, taken from: http://www.xe.com/currencyconverter/full/
Photo Credit: ‘Paris’ by Christian Scheja is licensed under CC by 2.0
