VIVAN Life Sciences Blog
Educate Girls, an NGO founded by Mumbai-based Safeena Husain, entered into a Development Impact Bond (DIB) contract – an innovative funding model that ties funding to outcomes – with the UBS Optimus Foundation and Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) in 2015.
For the three-year-project covering 166 schools across 140 villages in Bhilwara, Rajasthan, the targets were to enrol out-of-school girls (between the ages of 7 and 14) and improving the learning outcomes in literacy and numeracy (for marginalised children in Classes 3-5).
The innovative results-based financing model works through the collaboration of three key stakeholders – a primary investor, the service provider, and the outcome payer.
The primary investor is the one who funds the social impact project expecting a return at the end, which in this case was UBS Optimus Foundation.
The second key stakeholder is the service provider that executes the projects on the ground, to attain results by funds procured from the primary investor. In this case, the service provider was Educate Girls.
And the third is the outcome payer who pays the primary investor the full investment plus returns on successful attainment of the bond’s targets. In this case, the outcome payer was CIFF.
An independent evaluator verifies the service provider’s achievement.
On the DIB’s completion in 2018, Educate Girls not just achieved but surpassed both its target outcomes! 116% of the target of enrolment of out-of-school girls and 160% of the overall goal for learning outcomes.
The Educate Girls’ DIB successfully enrolled over 760 eligible out-of-school girls identified in the program area, and in the final year, learning levels for students in program schools grew 79% more than their peers in other schools – almost the difference of an entire additional year of instruction.
It was anything but easy to achieve these results.
Reference: The better India
