The Education Outcomes Fund works to attract private capital to invest in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal addressing quality education.

FREETOWN AND LONDON, SIERRA LEONE AND UNITED KINGDOM, September 1, 2022 /EINPresswire.com/ -- The Education Outcomes Fund (EOF), a hosted trust fund at UNICEF, has launched the largest ever outcomes fund for education-focused giving, helping 134,000 children in 325 public primary schools in Sierra Leone. The EOF funding model revolutionises giving and government spending in the education sector.

The Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC) is an $18M USD programme, co-financed by the government of Sierra Leone and international donors that will fund five, child and education-focused organisations to improve children’s literacy and numeracy outcomes in state primary schools, with a particular focus on improving girls education outcomes.

Sierra Leonean Education Minister David Moinina Sengeh will speak about SLEIC at a ceremony in Freetown on September 1st, announcing the start of the programme. Mr Sengeh said,
"The Government of Sierra Leone is excited about partnering with EOF to launch the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge. The programme will directly support children across the country and generate important evidence on which innovative education interventions can help drive foundational learning outcomes for all children. It is a perfect example of how we leverage innovation to transform our education service delivery and financing to deliver on the government's promise of free quality school education for all."

About the programme
● Using an outcomes-based approach, organisations involved will be paid once their interventions have shown improvements in children’s literacy and numeracy.
● They are a mix of local and global providers, including National Youth Awareness Forum, Rising Academies, Street Child, EducAID and Save the Children.
● The programme will be rigorously evaluated to understand their impact on learning, enabling evaluators to identify the approaches that are most effective.
● The approach utilises social impact bonds whose model has been successfully implemented in other sectors on a smaller scale. EOF has taken the steps in its programmatic approach to help scale up the output of impact bonds for its programmes.
● The programme has sustainability at its core. The interventions are designed to be both affordable and scalable so that the government can incorporate them into future education policy and scale up the most impactful approaches to a national level after the programme finishes in 2025.

Amel Karboul, CEO of EOF said:

“We face an unprecedented global learning crisis that requires a different approach to funding education programmes and measuring their impact. Access to quality education improves lives and livelihoods. Education equals opportunity. We are working with the Sierra Leonean government to develop programmes that are evidence-driven, enable innovation, and most importantly, measurably improve the quality of education for children and young people in the country.”

In 2018, the Sierra Leonean government made education more accessible through their Free Quality School Education (FQSE) policy that eliminated school fees in public schools which helped improve attendance and increased school access for 700,000 students. They now aim to improve the quality of education through SLEIC, and are providing $1.5 million USD in funding for the programme.
Though a child in Sierra Leone can expect to complete 8.9 years of school, they only acquire 4.5 years of actual learning given the current education challenges in the country. As recent as 2014, 87% of Primary 2 students (ages 7-8) were considered illiterate.
Governments around the world have shown interest in this approach, with EOF developing a broad pipeline of opportunities beyond Sierra Leone to support learning and employment outcomes for 10 million children and young people around the world.

-Ends-


MEDIA CONTACTS
EOF Press Contact

Sean Curtis-Ward
Managing Director
The Goodwork Organisation
E: info@thisisgoodwork.org
P: +44 (0) 20 8747 1488

For the Sierra Leonean government institutions involved please contact:

Augustine Sankoh
E: augustus.sankus@yahoo.com
P: +232 78 316181

or

Mariama Rogers
E: Mariama.Rogers@dsti.gov.sl
P: +232 75 709963

NOTES TO EDITORS:

Spokespeople available for interview

David Moinina Sengeh: Sierra Leonean Minister of Basic and Senior Secondary Education and Chief Innovation Officer for the Directorate of Science, Technology and Innovation
Dr. Amel Karboul: Chief Executive Officer, EOF
Max McCabe: Chief Operating Officer, EOF
Miléna Castellnou: Chief Programmes Officer, EOF
Madiana Samba: EOF Country Director, Sierra Leone

Effectiveness of Development & Social Impact Bonds

For case study examples of past successful development & social impact bonds, please see here

About the Education Outcomes Fund:

There are few greater challenges faced by the global community than the twin crises of learning poverty and youth unemployment. In response, the Education Commission (chaired by Gordon Brown, former UK Prime Minister and UN Special Envoy for Global Education) and the Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (chaired by Sir Ronald Cohen) came together with our founding CEO (Her Excellency Dr.) Amel Karboul to create EOF end of 2017.

EOF aims to improve the education and employment outcomes of 10 million children and youth, by supporting governments to utilise a range of innovative finance instruments at scale.

EOF is the first outcomes fund hosted by the United Nations within UNICEF, as a scalable platform to partner with governments, donors, implementing partners, and investors around the world. EOF pays primarily on the basis of the results achieved, ensuring that taxpayer-funded domestic resources, aid, and philanthropic funds are only used to pay for what works. This is a game-changing way to finance results in education, focusing attention and realigning systems on the most challenging but most important measure of a programme's performance: whether it is improving lives.

Since our inception in 2018, EOF has: Partnered with governments in Ghana and Sierra Leone to establish the two largest outcomes funds to date in developing countries (in any sector).
Established partnerships with leading institutions such as the UBS Optimus Foundation, Atlassian Foundation, Bank of America, Dubai Cares, and donor governments from the UK (FCDO), Switzerland (Seco) and South Korea (KOIKA) among others
Become established as the leading global player in outcomes-based funding (OBF), as the only dedicated centre of expertise for OBF in education and skills.
Become established as the first outcomes fund hosted by the United Nations.
Built our institutional capacity to contract and implement large-scale outcomes funds more efficiently

Sean Curtis-Ward, Managing Director
The Goodwork Organisation Ltd
+44 20 8747 1488
info@thisisgoodwork.org