Evaluating the Quality Education India DIB: How Outcomes-Based Financing Can Shape Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Additionality

Tuesday, 27th October 2026
12:00-14:00 CET // 16:30-18:30 IST
Online

Registration coming soon.

About the Webinar
Over the past decade, Innovative Financing for Education (IFE) has gained increasing attention as a potential way to mobilise additional resources along with improving the effectiveness and efficiency of education spending. Innovations in financing approaches can include drawing on non-traditional sources of financing, such as upfront capital from private investors, and financial management approaches like results-based or outcomes-based financing (OBF). These approaches often bring together diverse stakeholders – e.g., governments, private and philanthropic funders, impact investors, implementing organisations, researchers and evaluators – in new forms of collaboration, in which actors engage with and apply management practices shaped by sectors other than their own.

Despite this growing interest, evidence on whether, how, and under what conditions these approaches contribute to more and better financing for education remains limited.

This webinar will discuss the key learnings and legacy of the Quality Education India Development Impact Bond (QEI-DIB) – the world’s largest education-focused development impact bond (DIB) at the time of its launch in 2018. It used a multi-provider, multi-intervention model to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes for more than 200,000 children in India.

The session will present findings from an independent evaluation of the QEI-DIB, conducted by NORRAG and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, with support from the UBS Optimus Foundation. The evaluation examines how the DIB mechanism contributed to mobilising private capital, shaping implementation and performance management, and supported a broader shift towards focusing on outcomes within the Indian education system.

Alongside the research findings, participants will hear directly from the organisations that designed, financed, managed and implemented the QEI-DIB. By combining independent evidence with first-hand perspectives, the session will explore whether, how and under what conditions the model worked, where it encountered challenges, and what its interaction with the wider outcomes-based financing (OBF) ecosystem means for the future of DIBs and innovative financing in education more broadly.

Bringing together researchers, practitioners, policymakers, funders, and corporate and philanthropic actors, the webinar will engage stakeholders in a discussion on what the QEI DIB has taught us about applying outcomes-focused approaches to achieve more and better financing for education.

Read the Case Study.
This webinar is part of a Webinar Series titled What We Know About Innovative Financing for Education.

Speakers: