The Outcomes Problem: What Results-Based Financing Actually Looks Like in Practice

About the session Social enterprises play a critical role in developing and refining high-impact services for underserved communities, often introducing new innovations and disrupting existing systems. Sustaining that impact over the long term means embedding these innovations into the public systems they disrupt. To make that leap from social innovator to public partner, some organizations have turned to results-based or outcomes-based financing, using it to chart a path toward long-term public-private contracts. These mechanisms can help partnerships scale by making all costs visible, testing service specifications, and making results transparent. Rather than paying primarily for what organisations do, results-based financing is linked to verified results, and in theory, can create greater flexibility for implementers, stronger incentives around impact and clearer accountability. In practice, they raise hard questions: which outcomes should determine payment, how to measure them credibly without creating an excessive reporting burden, who carries the financial risk when results fall short, and how these models work when governments are not simply partners in implementation, but funders and decision-makers themselves. Building on a well-received discussion at the Skoll World Forum, this session will explore how enterprises are transitioning from innovators to long-term public partners, drawing on perspectives from Africa and other global contexts. Through an interactive exchange of practical lessons from working with governments across different policy environments, financing models, and stages of ecosystem maturity, participants will surface insights to strengthen public-private partnerships and accelerate the scale-up of high-impact services. Discussion Group Leaders Benoit Renard is Co-CEO at Tiko, advancing sustainable health systems that expand adolescent girls' access to HIV, contraception, and sexual violence services across sub-Saharan Africa. Lindsay Stradley is Co-Founder & Executive Director at Fresh Life (The Sanergy Collaborative) expanding access to safe and sustainable urban sanitation services through partnerships with local governments. Nayantara Watsa is Chief Strategy & Development Officer at Tiko, mobilizing innovative financing and partnerships to scale sustainable health services for adolescent girls across sub-Saharan Africa. Hopolang Selebalo is Policy and Advocacy Head at SmartStart, advancing access to quality early childhood development services for children in underserved communities across South Africa through partnerships with government. Who This Is For This session is for development funders, governments, philanthropists, implementers, development finance practitioners, and impact investors interested in designing financing around measurable outcomes for essential public services. What You Will Get Out of It A practical understanding of how outcomes-based and results-based financing work Lessons from implementing RBF in partnership with government Insights into selecting and verifying outcomes without creating unnecessary complexity A clearer view of how risk and incentives shift under outcomes-based models Perspectives on combining outcomes-based financing with government co-financing