Growing In Spirals

Learning, Connecting, and Expanding OBF in ECCE

Louise Albertyn, Özsel Beleli, Carolina Laguna, and Jessica Trollip

The Learning and Engagement Team, the Education Outcomes Fund

We often think of growth as a straight line. In practice, it rarely is. As Carl Jung put it when talking about personal development, growth happens in a spiral; we come over the same point where we have been before, but it is never exactly the same.

That has been our experience with outcomes-based financing (OBF) in early childhood care and education (ECCE). We come back to the same challenging topics: measurement, equity, scale, systemic impact. But each time, the context is different. The constraints shift. The trade-offs look slightly unfamiliar. Over the past three years, we have found ourselves returning to these challenges again and again - each time learning a bit more, adjusting our approach, and carrying something forward. This is what growth has looked like.

Re-imagining Organisational Learning as a Non-Linear Process

When we began co-designing with our government partners the outcomes funds in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and South Africa, we assumed we would build on what had already been done in OBF for ECCE and captured as published case studies, good practices and guidance on design. But when we looked for those learnings in a format we could use, they were hard to find.

Some of them existed in unpublished documents, but most of the learnings sat with people. Decisions that had been difficult at the time were not always written down. Trade-offs were rarely captured in a way that made sense outside the original context. So, instead of starting with a clear knowledge base, we found ourselves piecing things together.

That is what led us to invest in the Collective Learning Initiative in partnership with the Government Outcomes Lab (GO Lab) and NORRAG. We wanted to convene practitioners who had worked on OBF in ECCE, sometimes years earlier, and ask them to revisit the design decisions they had made. What was harder than expected? What would they do differently? What didn’t quite get resolved?

It was not easy to bring these practitioners together. Many of them had moved on to new roles, new countries, new priorities. Taking time to reflect on past work was a real ask. It was an even bigger ask because it involved speaking openly about things that did not fully work, or design decisions made under time pressure. There were also concerns about sharing knowledge that could be considered as part of an organisation’s ‘proprietary knowledge’.

What helped was time and repetition as well as being brought together by highly respected research institutions. We did not try to get to everything in one conversation— we came back to the same questions across sessions. We were clear about what stayed in the room and what would be shared more widely.

Vulnerability is a rare currency. But we found that when we, along with our peers, stopped “protecting” our lessons, we started solving shared problems collectively. And gradually, people opened up. Not all at once, but enough to start seeing patterns across experiences. GO Lab and NORRAG captured these emerging patterns in publications to make them available to all practitioners now – and in the future. This included an Evidence Review of OBF for ECCE, a Practice Note on Measuring Outcomes, two case studies (Tennessee High-Quality Pre-K and Programa Primero Lee) and a guidance note on Aligning Outcomes-Based Financing to Early Childhood Care and Education Systems in Sub-Saharan African Countries. More materials, including knowledge exchange takeaways, can be found on the CLI pages of GO Lab and NORRAG. 

Deep collective learning depends on trust. And trust, like learning, grows incrementally over time.

However, in some technical areas, there was limited past experiences to draw from. For example, when it came to measuring ECCE process quality or child development outcomes or to incentivising disability inclusion, we could not find prior OBF experiences that were relevant to the contexts we were working in. So, we had to look elsewhere. We set up an expert advisory group on ECCE measurement tools, worked with experienced research partners to adapt the selected measurement tools, and collaborated with disability inclusion experts to guide our approach.

We learned a lot in the process. But just as importantly, we insisted on capturing those learnings and making them usable for others. For example, we collaborated with experts to produce a technical brief series on OBF in ECCE covering Assessing and Selecting Measurement Tools, Adapting and Piloting Measurement Tools, Designing for Disability Inclusion, Designing Impact Evaluations and Pricing Outcomes. That has been one of our commitments over the past three years. For us, learning is not only about improving our own work. It is also about capturing and sharing those learnings so that the next iteration is easier—for us and for others working in this space.

Growing as a Field by Connecting our Spirals of Learning

There are not that many actors in the field of OBF in education. When each of us builds our own spiral, without much connection to others, progress is slower than it needs to be. We spend precious time working through questions that others are also facing, even if in different contexts. Externally facilitated efforts like the Collective Learning Initiative provide a boost to strengthening relations and building the foundations for continuous collective learning in our field. But as a community, we still need to come up with our own self-sustaining channels of learning from each other.

And we have already taken the first steps in building these channels. In recent years, organisations working on OBF in education have convened several panels together at events, such as at the Comparative and International Education Society’s (CIES) and the Education and Development Forum’s (UKFIET) conferences, and organised webinars to discuss in real time the programmes we are working on. Many of us leave these moments of brief connection asking for more frequent and more extensive opportunities to connect and to share.

We think our field could grow faster if these global events became moments of joint reflection within a continuous collective learning process. So that a discussion at one event feeds into the next with opportunities for informal exchanges in between. Over time, the same group of people could return to a question, saying “we tried this, and it did not quite work,” and the group continues building from there, together.

As the Learning & Engagement team at EOF, we think our community has the right ingredients to continue moving forward in this direction. We have trusting relationships and a shared commitment to growing the OBF field in education. And, through the Collective Learning Initiative and past panels at global events, we have already gotten a taste of the magical spark that emerges when we gather around the same table.

The challenges we deal with in the OBF space do not have single, fixed answers. Questions around how to balance incentives for scale with a focus on equity, or how to measure outcomes in ways that are both rigorous and practical so it can be scaled, keep coming back in different forms. Each time, the context shifts a little. Each time, the answer needs rethinking and adjusting.

These are not problems we solve once. They are challenges we come back to, together.

By sharing insights in real time across organisations, we can avoid tackling the same challenges in isolation and start building on each other’s progress. That way, our spirals can build on one another with layered loops of accumulated learning and experience, and we can truly grow as a field.

Expanding the OBF Field by Connecting with Other Fields

Even when the people working on OBF are more connected, there is still a risk of staying within a relatively small circle that is hard to access because of its highly technical nature. Expanding the OBF field in education also means widening the conversation and making it more accessible.

For us, that has meant spending time building bridges between OBF practitioners and those working more broadly in education and ECCE systems. These are not communities that naturally overlap. They use different languages, focus on different parts of the system, and often operate in separate networks.

Over the past couple of years, we have tried to create spaces where these groups can engage with each other more regularly. This started with the Innovative EduFinance Learning Group, in partnership with the Education Finance Network (EFN). More recently, it has continued through the Innovative Finance for Early Childhood Development Working Group, together with Early Childhood Development Action Network (ECDAN), the Brookings Institution, and EFN.

These conversations take time to build. They do not always lead to immediate outcomes. But they matter. Partly because they create the relationships that future outcomes partnerships will depend on. But also because they bring different perspectives into the discussion. They challenge some of our assumptions in the OBF space. They raise questions that we might not have considered. And they help keep us grounded in the realities of the education systems we are trying to work within.

These exchanges have been an important reminder for us. OBF is not a standalone solution. It is one approach that can contribute to improving access to quality ECCE, but only when it is designed with a clear understanding of the system around it. That means collaborating with organisations that have deep sectoral and contextual knowledge, starting from what already exists and thinking carefully about how to strengthen it, rather than trying to build something entirely new alongside it.

Growing the field, then, is not only about bringing more OBF champions into the space. It is also about staying open to challenge, paying attention to context, and being clear about where OBF can add value, and where it may not be the right tool.

Continuing along the Learning Spiral

Looking back, our learning over the past three years have not followed a straight path. We have returned to the same technical challenges and design questions with new information, new contexts, and new partners. And each time it was from a slightly different perspective, and with a little more clarity. As we plant the seeds of new ECCE outcomes partnerships in countries like Namibia, we bring greater confidence to these questions than we did three years ago, tempered by the humility of knowing the learning never truly ends.

That is what the learning spiral has meant in practice. Letting our organisation and our peers’ work shape what comes next, without assuming that the answer will be the same.

Progress in the OBF space does not come from moving in a straight line, but from returning to the same challenges with greater depth, together.

As the OBF field grows, these challenges will continue to surface in new contexts and partnerships. The task is not to resolve them once and for all, but to keep the learning loops connected–within organisations, across the OBF field, and with those working alongside us in the education systems.

If we can do that, the learning loops for OBF in education become growing spirals. Not only wider, but also more effective and better grounded in the systems we are trying to strengthen.