Article: Emerging Global Social Impact Bond Practice
On Tuesday I published an article in the Philanthropist. The article provides evidence about how social impact bonds (a tool of social finance that governments use sometimes) have performed since 2010. You can view it here.
Because the Philanthropist does not publish images, I thought it might be useful to include some of the tables and charts from the dataset that I created. See below!
The implementation periods have concluded for more projects than are in this chart. However, I did not code as complete projects where I was unable to ascertain whether evaluation has been concluded and results determined. In some cases follow up has confirmed that evaluation reports were not yet available (as of September 2016).
The reason for a discrepancy between the two numbers for full risk transfer and private financing (and for no risk transfer and its subcategories) is that for one case the financing was entirely private but the outcomes payer was not a government, so no risk was transferred.
Demonstrate projects are those where the intervention itself is new (including new combinations of interventions, as was often the case). The aim of these projects is to “demonstrate” the effectiveness of the intervention itself. These fourteen projects might be considered the most innovative because they involve a relatively untested intervention. Next, projects coded as transplants had been tried and tested before, but either not by the service provider or not in the jurisdiction. Third, new collaborations entail multiple service providers cooperating to deliver interventions. To count as a new collaboration for these purposes the providers had to be working together (rather than simply dividing up areas of responsibility) and the cooperation had to be new, at least with respect to the intervention. The fourth category, scale, are cases where the provider had experience with the intervention in the area before. In some instances this involved genuine scaling, though not always. I called the category scale to keep it as close as possible to the NFF categories, but it is worth emphasizing that not all of these projects were actually bringing smaller interventions to scale. For instance, as part of the UK Youth Engagement Fund Prevista Ltd. was selected as the service provider for a second SIB, doing the same intervention (Youth Applied Positive Psychology) in the same jurisdiction and the target community is very similar in size –1000, compared to 800.
