Supporting and informing the learning agenda of the Education Outcomes Fund

Project overview

Outcomes fund mechanisms seek to encourage improvement in learning by rewarding education outcomes achieved by providers. In this way, providers are incentivised to innovate and find their own best approaches to implementation.

The governments of Ghana and Sierra Leone, supported by the Education Outcomes Fund (EOF) and donors, have each designed an outcomes funding mechanism under which payment is released after outcomes are assessed to have achieved pre-agreed targets. These initiatives are known, respectively, as the Ghana Education Outcomes Project (GEOP) and the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC).

The What Works Hub for Global Education is collaborating with the governments of Ghana and Sierra Leone and the EOF to study the effects of outcomes funding on education service providers. The What Works Hub for Global Education’s research team seeks to understand how providers innovate under these conditions, with a view to informing scale-up in-country and beyond. The team’s research asks the question: how can we learn from providers’ experience and implementation insights?

The study will focus on direct programme impact, which is subcategorised into four themes: status quo, interventions, direct impact, and Value for Money (VFM) and scaling. The current research is especially centred around interventions and direct impact. It is performed via surveys and assessments with 1,220 schools in Ghana and 650 schools in Sierra Leone.