For the last few years, Tiko — a South African nonprofit — has been betting on itself.
It’s done so through development impact bonds, a type of financing where private investors front the money for social programs and receive returns if those programs deliver — in other words, if a project meets specific, measurable outcomes like reducing unintended pregnancies or increasing service uptake.
Today, Tiko took that approach one step further, launching a Girls’ Outcomes Platform to expand outcomes-based financing across Kenya, South Africa, and the continent as a whole. With this new platform, Tiko hopes to accelerate the shift toward paying for outcomes instead of activities and blending donor contributions, government co-funding, and private philanthropy into one, pooled structure.
“When a program was traditionally funded, it had a lot of costs that a government would never be able to support,” said Benoit Renard, one of Tiko’s co-founders and co-chief executive officers, before the launch. “With outcome-based financing, you have an incentive to actually optimize the implementation of your program. You can start to measure the cost per outcome, which is a language that the local government can start to actually buy into.”
About the author
Elissa Miolene
Elissa Miolene reports on USAID and the U.S. government at Devex. She previously covered education at The San Jose Mercury News, and has written for outlets like The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Washingtonian magazine, among others. Before shifting to journalism, Elissa led communications for humanitarian agencies in the United States, East Africa, and South Asia.
