Photo: Visual News Associates / World Bank

GPRBA is actively seeking to ensure that the projects it supports include women as beneficiaries. GPRBA is also undertaking efforts to monitor and evaluate the outcomes to determine how to improve the inclusion of women and girls as project beneficiaries. 

These sector tools on gender are designed to help teams who are designing RBF projects. They provide sector-specific entry points, key questions to consider, and sample objectives and indicators to serve as a compendium of tools in different sectors. 

Each of these reports describes how women and girls face disadvantages in each sector, and how RBF has been used as a tool to seek to improve all lives, with special emphasis on women and girls. Several case studies serve as successful examples of efforts to target and reach disadvantaged groups, especially women so that no one is left behind. 

 ENERGY     EDUCATION        URBAN         WATER       CLIMATE CHANGE       GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE

Photo: Sarah Farhat / World Bank

Results-based financing is being considered as a tool to help meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals by the year 2030. 

"From investing in health and education to providing water and sanitation, developing countries need $3.9 trillion each year to power their efforts toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. However, with $1.4 trillion invested in development each year, the annual investment gap remains high at $2.5 trillion.

To fill the financing gap, countries have increasingly adopted results-based financing, or RBF, as an innovative and effective approach to funding infrastructure and services. This approach has risen to the challenge in the last decade, growing to a market of over $25 billion in development spending.

What is results-based financing, and why is it gaining ground in global development?

In short, results-based financing is banking on development impact. RBF ensures that development funding is linked to pre-agreed and verified results, and that funding is provided when the results are achieved. Through a range of mechanisms, RBF helps deliver development outcomes, improves accountability, and drives both innovation and efficiency." (excerpt from the World Bank's external website)

Read entire article here

View Video: "What Does Results-Based Financing Mean to You?" 

Impact bonds are innovative performance-based contracts between an investor, an outcome funder, and a service provider that tackle a social or environmental challenge. They are a form of public-private partnership that rewards investors for successfully delivering impact. Investors are rewarded if providers meet agreed-upon outcomes but lose their investment if the providers underachieve or fail.

A note of clarity: impact bonds are not actually bonds. While they share some characteristics with bonds, such as the promise of a payment at a future date for a profit, they are not a fixed-income borrowing instrument and cannot be traded.

Some would argue that the popularity of impact bonds is due to the overall shift in focus to impact. Investors are increasingly looking not only for a financial return on their capital, but for the social and environmental impact their money is generating.

Like any other results-based financing (RBF) instrument, impact bonds transfer the financial risk away from scarce public resources. What distinguishes impact bonds from other RBF instruments is their ability to attract a private investor – especially in sectors that were historically not “bankable,” such as social sectors.

Another difference with impact bonds is that it is the investor and not the service provider who bears the financial risk. Why is that important? Service providers in social sectors are generally not for profit and do not have the creditworthiness to borrow on the market to pre-finance the delivery of services. Impact bonds address this constraint by incentivizing impact investors to provide the upfront capital.

In this sense, impact bonds reinforce the Maximizing Finance for Development mandate of the World Bank Group by prioritizing private capital and investment into development aid, and by blending concessional and private resources for greater impact.

The Global Partnership for Results-Based Approaches (GPRBA) has a diverse portfolio of results-based operations using blended finance approaches. Impact bonds are one of the instruments they are piloting in the World Bank.

In this video, World Bank Director Anna Wellenstein and Infrastructure Specialist Inga Afanasieva explain what impact bonds are, and how they work in development projects. Learn more about impact bonds on the website of the GPRBA website.