Recently Brian put down some of his thoughts about Results Based Funding with Village Enterprise's Chief Innovation and Financing Officer Celeste Brubaker. We believe RBF holds a lot of promise for increasing impact and actually moving the needle on a lot of problems that we've been "working on" for a long time with either no results or no idea if we are having results.
This new funding mechanism promises to merge technology and big data with best practice in philanthropy. By investing in the first poverty alleviation development income bond in Africa we saw firsthand that not only were people lifted out of poverty during the pandemic, the implementing organization (Village Enterprise) was able to adapt to the shocks they were experiencing and use that learning to better their program in other places and long after the DIB ended.
Don't we all adjust to challenges and new knowledge? Almost comically, traditional philanthropy does not. Because they are paid to provide a service that is agreed upon at the beginning without knowing what the future holds (and often without ever measuring if the desired outcomes are achieved). What do you think about RBF? We would love to hear from you!