At Social Finance India, we believe that in order to create significant social change, we need to facilitate technical
experts to work at scale in conjunction with government priorities. We believe that fragmented philanthropic
funding will not achieve India’s national goals.
We need to:
Think big and catalyze
funding across a variety
of sources
Make money go
further by investing
smartly
Bring private sector
financial rigor and tools to
manage social investments
We have developed a unique approach combining data, investment partnerships, objective evaluation
and original thinking to solve India’s most pressing challenges.
Our
ROLE
Our
ROLE
Social Finance India partners with private investors, financial institutions, and philanthropic organizations to create innovative financing solutions to improve social outcomes. In the Pay for Success and Impact Bond market, we provide support for all phases of work: from advisory services to structuring instruments and mobilizing capital to actively managing the project through its entire life cycle. We also work on developing the Pay for Success field through market education, publications, events, research and analysis.
Our
INITIATIVES
Our
INITIATIVES
Social Finance India is currently focused on addressing two
inadequacies that exist in the Indian market today:
- Poor learning outcomes amongst students in the education sector.
- Lack of SDG-aligned investment instruments.
Our
INITIATIVES
Our
INITIATIVES
Primary (G1-5) & Upper Primary (G6-8)
Outcomes
- Literacy and Numeracy
Intervention Models
- System Capacity Building: Teacher Training, School Leadership etc.
- Ed. Tech for Upper Primary
- Teaching and learning practices
01
Secondary Grades (G9-12)
Outcomes
- Better Board exams results
- Competitive exams success
- Spoken English Skills
Intervention Models
- Ed-Tech
- STEM education
- Spoken English
- Comptetive exams preparedness
02
Education to Employment
Outcomes
- Placement and Retention Percentage
- Access for LIY/ Gender bias
- Earnings
Intervention Models
- Specialized skills for sunrise sectors like healthcare
- Technical skills
- Spoken English
- General Employability skills
03
Skilling
Outcomes
- Gainful employment for 150,000 -200,000 youth
Intervention Models
- Training in partnership with NSIDC
- Work on skilling 12 million youth who enter workforce in India every year
- By 2027 India will have the largest workforce
04
In order to address these challenges, Social Finance India is working on the initatives below :
01.
India Education
Outcomes Fund
The India Education Outcomes Fund (IEOF) will raise and disburse $1 billion in to education outcomes through innovative financial instruments. The IEOF will convene partnerships across investors, service providers and outcome funders to address India’s most pressing education challenges. The fund portfolio will support students through targeted objectives across the learning journey, from early childhood to workforce transition.
02.
Sustainable Development
Goals Finance Facility
Social Finance India has partnered with UNDP to setup the Sustainable Development Goals Finance Facility (SDGFF). SDGFF will design SDG-aligned catalytic financial instruments that will balance the needs of product beneficiaries and funders, develop an effective go to market strategy and build the wider ecosystem holistically to address India’s priority development challenges.
According to UNCTAD, India is currently experiencing an investment gap of approx $0.5 trillion to achieve the SDGs, representing a quarter of India’s GDP.
Government spending and traditional philanthropy alone cannot close this gap; new funding streams from the private sector are required.
Despite growing appetite for responsible investing, private sector investment at-scale in India is constrained by a lack of
commercial instruments.
SFF will bring innovations from other markets to India, such as Green Bonds and SDG bonds. SFF will also collaborate with thought leaders to co-create new India-centric products such as CSR bonds.
Please refer to the Press Release to learn more
03.
Ed. Tech Solutions
for Marginalised Tribal Populations
Tribals (~9% of India’s population) continue to have one of the lowest enrolment and retention rates as well as learning outcomes in India, impacting their ability to integrate into the mainstream economy. While the national average literacy rate is ~73%, it falls to ~59% for Scheduled Tribes (ST) and the school dropout among these students is higher too at~22% more than the national average.
Within a single grade, there are wide variations in student learning levels and aptitudes. This makes it impossible for teachers to tailor their delivery for each student, under traditional education pedagogy and bring them up to grade level. Tribal students face additional hurdles of weak learning community ecosystem and negligible exposure to education technology, making it harder for remedial learning. As a result, low-performing students are permanently left behind and drop out as they do not receive the academic support they need.
We propose to co-create a Pay for Success framework through an Impact Bond, to scale ed.tech solutions in tribal schools. The objective is to widen the student base for improvements through personalized adaptive learning from existing 35 Ashram Tribal schools in Maharashtra to 100 schools, empowering ~40,000 tribal students. This partnership would showcase the effectiveness of EdTech integration into rural Govt. schools to improve learning outcomes and a successful scale-up through outcomes-based funding would lay the roadmap for positively impacting the entire ecosystem of 4,400+ Ashram Tribal schools across India in subsequent phases.
Aim is to improve Math, English and Marathi learning outcomes for ~40,000 Grade 1-8 tribal students in 100 schools over 3 years and reduce dropouts
Evaluation of the program has shown learning gains of 2-2.5x as opposed to the control group.
Build successful partnership model with potential to replicate across 4,400+ schools in India thus positively impacting outcomes for ~18L students.