On 6 February, we hosted our first event of 2020, which invited attendees “into the kitchen,” to discuss what we’ve learned and the challenges we’ve encountered during the last two years, building the world’s first outcomes fund for education.
We started the event by discussing how the current model of education financing hampers NGOs’ abilities to deliver and contributes to the learning crisis. EOF is looking to challenge the status quo by shifting to outcomes based financing.
Amel Karboul, CEO, emphasized that, “governments often don’t think in outcomes”. This is why EOF partners with governments and helps to build their outcomes commissioning capacity. These partnerships will support their priorities in education and lead to sustainable improvements in programs.
We discussed how PPPs can become true “partnerships for public purpose”, some of the challenges when trying to price outcomes, and the iterative approach that EOF has taken to program design.
The audience, which included representatives from the education sector and beyond, asked challenging questions during a very open and frank conversation. Questions included how EOF is factoring inclusivity into our strategy, how are we measuring long-term impact, how does the sharing of risk impact strategy, and more. These questions sparked a lively debate.
We closed by talking through the exciting plans we have for 2020, and the progress we’ve made in launching our first programs. Stay tuned for more on our events; we are planning to hold several more around the world throughout the course of the year.