Changing education landscape with Development Impact Bonds
Geetu Vaid
The New Education Policy (NEP) talks about increasing funding to the education sector to 6% of GDP. Apart from additional financing, there is a need to ensure that existing financing is better spent and reaches the most vulnerable groups of the society effectively; i.e., each rupee spent on a child should deliver a higher social return on investment.
Specifically, in the Indian education landscape, several reports (including those from World Bank, UNICEF, ASER, etc) highlight that the school access for students have not necessarily translated into the desired levels of learning; i.e. paying for inputs does not necessarily mean impact.
Given the financing gap faced in achieving their Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), governments and donors in many countries have increasingly adopted Results Based Financing (RBF) approaches to increase the effectiveness of their development spends. In light of that, a relatively new model of financing, the Development Impact Bond (DIB) makes a case to ensure better outcomes for the beneficiaries, especially for developing countries.
India currently has 2 ongoing DIBs in Education namely, The Haryana Early Literacy DIB and Quality Education India DIB. Educational Initiatives has been one of the only organisations globally that has participated as two different actors in the DIBs: as an outcome evaluator and a service provider.
In an interaction Pranav Kothari, VP, Large Scale Education Programmes, Educational Initiatives shares the success of the DIB initiative in the Indian school space. Excerpts:
How can DIBs be beneficial in the COVID time when there is a major disruption in normal functioning of schools?
Given that the DIBs have a focus on improving learning outcomes, it forces the participants to think of alternative ways to continue education for children even though the schools are closed. Note that DIBs should not be seen as a panacea for all development sector challenges and are more suited in certain contexts such as for scaling evidence-based solutions and in cases where greater service provider capacity to adapt/innovate adds significant value to the intervention.
In the light of the current Covid-19 pandemic, technology in education has seen greater adoption than ever before. Much innovation has been seen in this area, with teachers recording lessons, sharing input over phone calls, state using TV networks to provide educational input, use of community radios, etc. Digital learning has also seen a surge among households that have access to smartphones and the Internet.
Your experience and success in the Haryana initiative.
The Haryana Early Literacy intervention is the first-ever Development Impact Bond (DIB) project in India to leverage CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) funding for outcomes payment exclusively focusing on early literacy. It involves the Haryana School Shiksha Pariyojna Parishad (HSSPP) and Language & Learning Foundation (LLF) in partnership with IndusInd Bank and SBI Capital Markets.
While this project is still underway, LLF has reached out to over 12,000 number of students over a duration of 12 months, since we commenced the project. LLF is aiming to reach out to 1 lakh students in next 2 years. This DIB will scale up the existing program of Language and Learning Foundation in the state of Haryana. Educational Initiatives is playing the role of an outcome evaluator in the DIB. The learning levels will be measured for young children in grades 1 & 2 through a FLN app – which is the first time that students are taking a specialised FLN assessment on a mobile phone or tablet.
Brief synopsis of the Lucknow initiative
The Quality Education India DIB is launched by a consortium of UBS Optimus Foundation, British Asian Trust, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and Tata Trusts. $1.39m over three years will be provided to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes in Lucknow. The DIB demonstrates the benefits of innovative financing mechanisms and Partnership models to the government to bring about a significant change in the Indian educational system.
The role of EI is of a service provider. In partnership with Pratham Infotech Foundation, EI has implemented Mindspark in 55 schools serving 11,000 students in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh for improving learning outcomes in Language & Math. EI and PIF joined the implementation of Mindspark from 2019-20 (Y-2 of the bond). Mindspark has seen strong gains (end-line less baseline) in Y-1 year, while control school gains have been minimal; leading to 7x achievement in learning outcomes compared to targets.
As a response to the pandemic, we have made the Mindspark programme available online for children to use via smartphones. We have seen examples of students using the software to learn as high and jump 2-3 learning levels. A kid of learning level of grade 3 in class 7 has used Mindspark during the pandemic for Rs200 hours come up to learning level of a grade 6 student!
What were the major challenges in making this model accepted and implemented on ground and how these were tackled?
One has to convince funders that the learning outcomes will happen based on past performance – since there is always a risk involved and people may lose money if learning impact doesn’t happen.
A lot of the reputation of the service providers is at stake and people need to get comfortable with that. There will be 3rd party evaluation and the results will be in public domain.
Getting government permissions to work in their schools with their students
Mobilising a field team and executing against an agenda
What is the road ahead for DIB concept?
By changing the bottom 5% of the most effective funds towards a model like DIBs can help increase the return on capital invested by the government. So by diverting money away from projects that do not add learning value-add to those that do, is something that DIBs can provide.
quality education for lakhs of kids
