Project: Rwanda Poverty Graduation and Climate Resilience Outcomes Project
State of development: Current
Stage of development: Scoping
Type of instrument — Impact Bond: Yes; Outcomes Fund: No; Social Impact Incentives (SIINC): No; Social Impact Guarantee: No; Payment-by-results (no pre-financing): No; Technical Assistance and Market-building program: No; Other: 
Expected launch date: Q2 - 2023
Total expected project development time: 0-6 months
Expected length of project (years): 3
Rationale for using outcome-based finance: By tying payment to results, we expect to encourage and provide space for innovation and the highest-quality implementer-led performance management, ensuring multiple service providers can achieve the intended results at scale. It allows implementers to further and better adapt proven solutions to various context, demographics, and populations by putting the people we serve at the program’s center. This has been proven through the success of the Village Enterprise DIB, Africa’s first for poverty alleviation, which exceeded its targets and shielded households from the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic’s economic impacts.
Key challenges to launch: Outcomes funding
Role of the domestic government — Outcomes funder: No; Service provider: No; Member of project committee: No; No formal role: No; Other: Currently the domestic government is a partner in codesigning the project.
Proposed financing instruments — Debt: Yes; Equity: No; Guarantee: No; Grant: Yes; Other: 
Social/developmental challenge: In Rwanda over 6 million people are living in extreme poverty and climate change deepens inequalities as more frequent storms, flooding, drought, and changes in rainfall patterns are impacting the poorest communities the most, making it even more difficult to secure decent livelihoods. The government of Rwanda has adopted a Graduation Policy to eliminate poverty by 2030, but in the context of global funding constraints and varying returns to graduation programming across countries, there is more we must learn about how to most cost effectively graduate households to resilience in the Rwandan context. This outcomes project will incorporate a rigorous, rapid-cycle learning agenda from the onset of the project, and by tying payment to results will provide the flexibility and incentive to iterate, learn, and scale successfully.
Expected intervention model: Village Enterprise’s approach to economic inclusion centers around or cost-effective, one-year ‘Poverty Graduation’ model. We use rigorous targeting to identify rural households living in extreme poverty, provide training around savings, loans, and microenterprise development, establish ‘Business Savings Groups’ of thirty individuals, provide seed capital grants to start group businesses, and support through mentoring.
Policy sectors — Employment and private sector development: No; Education: No; Social protection: Yes; Criminal justice: No; Health: No; Agriculture: No; Environment and climate change: No; Water, Sanitation and Hygiene: No; Energy: No; Humanitarian: No; Early Childhood Education: ; Other: 
Primary SDG goal: 1
Secondary SDG goals: 1,5,13
Target population: Rural extreme poor households earning less than $1.90/day
Targeted number of unique service users or beneficiaries: 54000
Unit type of targeted beneficiaries: Other
Unit description: Households
Country income classification of beneficiaries — Low-income: Yes; Lower-middle-income: No; Upper-middle-income: No; High-income: No
Beneficiary notes: Target population: Minimum of 54,000 households and 360,000 direct and indirectly impacted individuals in the first three years.
Notes: Data for this pipeline project was last updated in April 2022.
Delivery location: Rwanda