From 18 to 20 May 2026, the RIVER-EU consortium came together in Brussels for three intense and meaningful days to share five years of work, reflect on what was built, and look ahead to what comes next.
18 May: General assembly
The General Assembly brought all project partners together for the last time at EuroHealthNet’s office in Brussels. We were also joined by Carina Pereira, RIVER-EU’s project officer from HaDEA. It was a moment to take stock of the collaboration, the numbers, and what the project leaves behind.
RIVER-EU coordinators, Michael Edelstein (Bar-Ilan University) and Cornelis Boersma (University Medical Center Groningen) led a reflection on the partnership and what it produced in numbers:
- 1 project, 5 years, 13 consortium members across 10 countries, 55 researchers and professionals, and at least 7 students for whom RIVER-EU contributed to a PhD or specialist training.
- The project generated 12 peer-reviewed publications (including in the BMJ and The Lancet) with many more in preparation, alongside 40+ conference presentations and posters, 8 dedicated events at scientific and health policy forums across Europe including the European Parliament, and over 10,000 views of video content.
- On the ground: 117 stakeholders from implementation communities involved in co-creation, 54 health promoters trained, 700 community members directly reached, and over 75 healthcare professionals who received training through the project. In terms of impact, the project achieved an almost doubling of intention to vaccinate for HPV and MMR among migrants in Greece, and increases of between 10 and 65% in intention to vaccinate in the other intervention countries. You can find more details in “RIVER-EU in a glance”.
But these numbers will not stop when the project ends. RIVER-EU is working with TechNet-21, the joint WHO-UNICEF technical platform, to ensure that its lessons learned and educational materials, and the RIVER-EU Guideline and Action Framework have an institutional home and continue to support immunisation programmes and underserved populations into the future.
Colin Campbell from UKHSA presented the RIVER-EU Guideline and Action Framework. It brings together five years of research, implementation and community-based learning to respond to a practical gap: while there is strong evidence on what can improve vaccination uptake, less guidance exists on how to adapt proven interventions to new communities and contexts. The guidance includes recommendations, case studies and a step-by-step participatory transferability approach, and the accompanying Action Framework offers practical tools, templates and resources to support local, regional and national action on vaccine equity.
RIVER-EU Guideline and Action Framework (link available soon)
Daniela Bobáková Fiľakovská from UPJŠ then led a SWOT analysis of factors that will influence the sustainability and continued use of the educational materials developed during the project, and worked with partners on concrete strategies to embed and scale the work beyond the project period.
You can now access these resources here.
Bobbie Farsides spoke on the ethics of sustainability and disengagement, a dimension of project closure that is rarely discussed but matters enormously when communities have been involved as genuine partners rather than research subjects.
This commitment to closing the loop with communities was reflected in practice: in the weeks leading to the closing events in Brussels, RIVER-EU held satellite events in five countries (the UK, Slovakia, Poland, Greece and the Netherlands) with the aim of going back to the communities and stakeholders who contributed to the project to thank them for their participation and to share what the project found and built together.
You can glance through our satellite events here.
The afternoon brought the full consortium together to reflect on outstanding publications and dissemination plans, and to map exploitation activities: connecting with ECDC and WHO/Europe to signpost the guideline and action framework, and embedding outputs in the TechNet-21 platform for ongoing reach.
19 May: Final conference: Making vaccine equity work
The final conference brought together researchers, community representatives, implementers, policymakers and international partners at the European Economic and Social Committee in Brussels. It was a public moment to share what RIVER-EU found, introduce the guideline, and map the policy pathways for taking the work forward.
20 May: Expert exchange: What do we fix, what do we protect?
The closing day was an invitation-based expert exchange bringing together select project partners and external experts from international organisations, civil society and national authorities working on vaccination and equity. The conversation was structured around two questions that feel increasingly urgent: what can we do now to fix the system and institutionalise RIVER-EU’s findings? And what do we need to protect and defend in a moment of constrained resources and political pressure?
The exchange ended not with conclusions but with commitments: individual and collective steps that participants were prepared to take forward.