How it works:
Real impact, in partnership
Every child deserves the chance to learn and every young person deserves the skills to get a good job. Yet too often, education systems measure what goes in rather than what comes out. Budgets, enrolment, and attendance are tracked, but real learning and employability lag behind.
EOF helps governments and donors change that. We use outcomes-based financing (OBF), a simple but powerful idea: funding is tied to measurable results. Payments are made only when outcomes are achieved.
Funders only pay when results are verified. That means the focus shifts from counting inputs like textbooks and training sessions to measuring real-world change, such as improved literacy, school readiness, and youth employment.
EOF’s outcomes partnership model is designed around the idea that lasting change happens when every actor in the system plays to their strengths and shares responsibility for results. By aligning different actors around common goals, EOF helps education systems shift from inputs to outcomes, from projects to partnerships, and from short-term funding to long-term impact.
Why it works?
As we forge change, we too are achanged
Within an outcomes partnership, EOF plays an end-to-end stewardship role. We mobilise and aligns public, philanthropic and private funders around shared outcome goals. We co-design programmes in close partnership with government and wider stakeholders to ensure policy relevance, local ownership and impact integrity. We structure, contracts and supports delivery partners to drive results on the ground.
EOF then launches, manages and governs the outcomes fund across its full lifecycle, overseeing performance management, independent verification and adaptive learning, so that ambition translates into measurable, verified outcomes.
Our work does not end when a programme concludes. EOF continues to work with governments, delivery partners and funders to support sustainability, institutionalisation and scale, helping ensure that effective approaches are embedded within systems and can endure beyond the life of the fund. At the ecosystem level, EOF actively shares learning on what worked, what did not, and why – contributing evidence, insights and practical tools to the broader outcomes and education and skills communities, and strengthening future partnerships and programmes.
Payment for Success
Service providers are only paid when outcomes, like literacy gains or job placements, are achieved and verified by independent evaluators. This ensures value for money and incentivises results, not activity.
Innovative by Design
Providers have the flexibility to test and refine interventions. In Sierra Leone’s Education Innovation Challenge, five implementers worked in parallel to improve learning for 134,000 students, creating space for comparative evidence and adaptability.
Focus on Systems
Unlike donor-run pilots, outcomes partnerships operate under government stewardship. Ministries set priorities and lead strategy. Gender equity, for instance, was embedded in Sierra Leone’s fund, where outcomes for girls triggered higher payments.
Open and Scalable
With standardized contracts and data systems, outcomes partnerships allow multiple actors to collaborate under one framework, creating efficiencies, enhancing accountability, and accelerating what works.
Our Portfolio:
From first words to first jobs
EOF’s programmes span a learning journey — from early childhood to school to work. Each Outcomes Partnership is co-created with governments to ensure national ownership and sustainability.
Following the first fund in Sierra Leone in 2022, EOF is scaling rapidly. In 2025, five new Outcomes Partnerships are being launched in Tunisia, Rwanda, South Africa, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, mobilising over $130 million to reach more than 500,000 learners.
Early childhood care & education
expanding access and quality for young learners.
Basic education
improving foundational learning, access, and inclusion.
Skills for employment
aligning training with market opportunities and job retention.
Beyond Programmes:
Learning what works and what doesn’t.
For EOF, outcomes-based financing is not an end in itself. It is a lever for transformation, a way to make education spending more effective, transparent, and accountable, while giving governments and partners the tools to deliver better outcomes at scale.
EOF doesn’t just fund programmes. We build the ecosystem that makes outcomes-based approaches possible and sustainable. Through our Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning work, we generate evidence, strengthen capacity, and connect practitioners and policymakers across countries and sectors.
Our focus is threefold:
Generating knowledge: gathering and sharing insights from outcomes-based programmes to inform smarter education investments.
Building capacity: partnering with governments, donors, and providers to strengthen data systems, contracting, and performance management.
Fostering collaboration: convening a global community of practice through to advance outcomes-based learning.
This work ensures that lessons from each programme contribute to a broader transformation, helping governments and development partners embed results-based thinking into policy, budgeting, and delivery systems.
Join Us
EOF is looking for champions of innovative financing, from governments and development agencies to philanthropic leaders, and impact investors, who all believe in smarter, fairer, and more effective ways to fund learning.
