Educate Girls, a non-profit organisation, has released the results of ‘Development Impact Bond’ (DIB) which is an outcome based financing model for social/development programmes.

The model focused on two targets: enrolment of girls and learning target achieved by both girls and boys in English, Hindi and Maths. Final results show that the Educate Girls achieved 116 per cent of the enrolment target and 160 per cent of the learning target, surpassing the target of enrolment and learning improvements.

The programme covered 7,000 children in 166 schools across 140 villages in Bhilwara in Rajasthan over three years.

“The DIB programme gave Educate Girls financial and operational flexibility that allowed us to quickly respond to lessons learnt in real time and stay completely focused on the results that matter. Participating in the DIB is helping us to build an organisation that delivers not just scale but quality at scale and stay accountable to every child in the programme, said Safeena Husain, Founder and Executive Director of Educate Girls.

“With traditional funding sources under strain, innovative, blended financing tools such as DIBs can prove to be instrumental in unlocking new private capital and encourage governments to invest more to address some of the most pressing development issues,” she said.

“They have shown the way for bringing in discipline, accountability and greater dynamic efficiency into the social sector where India has a long way to go,” said Shamika Ravi, Director of Research, Brookings India and Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India.

In this payment-by-results model, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) as an outcome payer (the underwriter) promised to pay back UBS Optimus Foundation (UBSOF, the investor) the original investment plus extra returns as long as the agreed targets are delivered by Educate Girls. The progress was independently evaluated by the non-profit evaluation firm IDinsight and results-based financing consultancy Instiglio designed the DIB.

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