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.”