Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires innovative financing mechanisms to support high-impact enterprises, especially in sectors like clean cooking, distributed renewable energy, and small-scale agribusiness.

Locally led development calls for reshaping existing processes and practices, to create a genuine power shift. Project Maitri, a pilot initiative aimed at improving girl’s education, is an example of such reshaping..

Four deal breaker questions to understand whether an outcomes-based approach or impact bond is right for you.

This report captures the evolutionary journey LEAP has been on since its inception in 2016, the challenges it faces as it continues to push for long term sustainability from philanthropic funding and the lessons learned for education programming from the Liberia Education Advancement Program (LEAP) perspective.

Social Finance with Fresh Life designed the first Results-Based Financing (RBF) mechanism for urban non-sewered sanitation in Kenya. This mechanism represents a significant step towards achieving universal access to improved sanitation. By focusing on results, we can ensure that every shilling spent translates into real, measurable improvements in sanitation, public health and quality of life.

Social outcomes marketplace - a potentially game-changing mechanism for buying and selling SDG outcomes. This approach could move beyond both carbon credits and the stop-start nature of traditional aid projects, offering a more direct and sustainable way to fund social impact. 

Listen to Social Finance International Director, Louise Savell, speak with Jack Farren of The Social Impact Journal about impact bonds, outcomes-based approaches, and local accountability for impact in international development.

We’re engaging with prominent actors in the voluntary carbon market to understand how high-impact enterprises could unlock carbon revenues. Here are some proposals for collective action.

As the Russia-Ukraine war continues, the international community has started to look towards Ukraine’s recovery needs. Outcomes-based contacting can play a part.

Outcomes-based contracting could have major benefits in fostering effective reconstruction across the country.

Five insights from the Mine Fields to Rice Fields development impact bond in Cambodia.

The pursuit of better social outcomes, not new products, should drive the international development community’s approach to innovative finance.

Outcomes-based finance shifts the focus away from what delivery partners have done, to the impact they have delivered. But measuring impact is difficult.

Young people in the poorest parts of Buenos Aires face significant challenges in entering the labour market. The country’s first social impact bond sought to change that.

Contracting for impact risk and opportunities.

How might outcomes-based partnerships help to build broader and longer-term capacity for effective policy implementation?

What conditions and characteristics are needed to successfully engage in outcomes-based partnerships?

On International Women’s Day, we reflect on the impact of the pandemic over the past two years.

Part five of our Lessons from Colombia series.

Part four of our Lessons from Colombia series.