How it works:
Real impact, in partnership
Every child deserves the chance to learn, and every young person deserves a real pathway into meaningful work and economic opportunity. Yet too often, education systems measure what goes in rather than what comes out. Budgets, enrolment and attendance are tracked, but real learning, employability and long-term outcomes often lag behind.
EOF helps governments and partners change that. We use outcomes-based financing (OBF), a simple but powerful idea: funding is tied to measurable results. Payments are made only when outcomes are achieved.
Funders only pay when results are verified. That means the focus shifts from counting inputs like textbooks and training sessions to measuring real-world change, such as improved literacy, school readiness, and youth employment.
Impact investors and implementing partners deliver programmes, taking on performance risk and gaining flexibility to innovate. This creates shared accountability across the system, aligning governments, funders, investors and delivery partners around measurable outcomes and public value.
Why it works?
As we forge change, we too are changed
Within an outcomes partnership, EOF plays an end-to-end stewardship and systems coordination role. We mobilise and align public, philanthropic and private funders around shared outcomes. We co-design programmes in close partnership with government and wider stakeholders to ensure policy relevance, local ownership and impact integrity. We structure contracts and supports delivery partners to drive results on the ground.
EOF then launches, manages and governs the outcomes fund across its full lifecycle, overseeing performance management, independent verification and adaptive learning, so that ambition translates into measurable, verified outcomes.
Our work does not end when a programme concludes. EOF continues to work with governments, delivery partners and funders to support sustainability, institutionalisation and scale, helping ensure that effective approaches become embedded within public systems and can endure beyond individual programmes or funding cycles. At the ecosystem level, EOF actively shares learning on what worked, what did not, and why – contributing evidence, insights and practical tools to the broader outcomes and education and skills communities, and strengthening future partnerships and programmes.
Payment for success
Implementing partners are only paid when outcomes, like literacy gains or job placements, are achieved and verified by independent evaluators. This ensures value for money and incentivises results, not activity.
Innovative by design
Providers have the flexibility to test, refine and adapt interventions in response to evidence and real-world implementation. Different implementers work in parallel, creating space for comparative evidence and adaptability.
Focus on systems
Unlike many standalone pilots or externally managed programmes, outcomes partnerships operate under government stewardship. Ministries set priorities and lead strategy. For example, when gender eqality is embedded in fund design, outcomes for girls trigger higher payments.
Open and scalable
With standardized contracts and data systems, outcomes partnerships allow multiple actors to collaborate under one framework, creating efficiencies, enhancing accountability, and accelerating what works.
Our portfolio:
from first words to first jobs
EOF’s programmes span a learning journey: from early childhood to school to work. Across contexts, we work with governments and partners to improve learning, workforce participation and long-term outcomes through accountable, outcomes-driven systems.
Early childhood care & education
expanding access and quality for young learners.
Quality basic education
improving foundational learning, access, and inclusion.
Skills for employment
aligning learning and workforce pathways with labour market demand, employment and retention.
Beyond programmes:
building systems that learn and improve.
For EOF, outcomes-based financing is not an end in itself. It is a lever for transformation, a way to make education and employment spending more effective, transparent, and accountable, while giving governments and partners the tools to deliver better outcomes at scale.
EOF doesn’t just build programmes. We grow the ecosystem that makes outcomes-based approaches possible and sustainable. Through our monitoring, evaluation and learning work, we generate evidence, strengthen capacity, and connect practitioners and policymakers across countries and sectors.
This work ensures that lessons from each partnership contribute to broader systems transformation, helping governments and partners embed outcomes-driven approaches into policy, budgeting and delivery systems.
Generating knowledge
gathering and sharing evidence from outcomes partnerships to inform smarter education, employment and public investment decisions.
Building capacity
partnering with governments, funders, providers and ecosystem actors to strengthen data systems, outcomes contracting, performance management and evidence-based decision-making.
Orchestrating collaboration
convening a global community of practice to advance outcomes-driven financing, public sector innovation and systems learning.
Join us
We are looking for champions of innovative financing, from governments and development agencies to philanthropic leaders and impact investors, who all believe in smarter, fairer, and more effective ways to fund learning.