Educate Girls, a Dasra portfolio organisation, has become the first Indian organisation to make use of Social Impact Bonds to launch a Pay by Results (PbR) programme, receiving support from Instiglio, a US-based non-profit social enterprise.
Educate Girls aims to create long term and sustainable social change by empowering girls and creating awareness in society about the importance of educating girls in the worst gender gap districts in India to enrol in and attend school.
Manas Ratha, director for social impact and portfolio at Dasra, told AVPN the Pay by Results (PbR) or Pay for Results (PfR) programme launched by Educate Girls will attract global donors who seek to address these issues by paying Educate girls for the results it achieves as opposed to paying for programmes delivered.
Manas explained that payments will be expected for the following outcomes: a) increased enrolment of girls in school; b) increased attendance in school and continued enrolment over several years; c) improvement in learning and test scores.
Existing donors will continue to fund the operations of the organisations but once it achieves results, the ‘buyer’ of these results will pay Educate Girls, thereby providing new funds for the organisation to expand its services.
“Unlike typical Social Impact Bonds,” Manas said, “the donors are not investors and will not receive their capital back with returns.” Rather, payments by the ‘buyer’ will become new funds for Educate girls. This way, he said, since the buyer of results will focus only on outcomes and impact, the organisation will have more flexibility in designing its programme.
Payments will be dependent on delivering each of the multiple outcomes and the payment amounts will be computed based on percentage of target achieved. The programme is currently a pilot programme with 200 schools.
Social investment bonds (SIBs) are being used by governments and other large donors to create clearer alignment of interest with implementing organizations. According to Manas, some other benefits of SIBs and PbRs are: greater transparency in grant making; flexibility for organisations to change and adapt their programmes for maximum impact; allowing organisations to be more results-oriented; and the potential for greater sophistication to attract better talent to the social sector.
For more information about Dasra and their programmes, visit: http://www.dasra.org/
