LiftEd was launched in 2024 with the aim of improving foundational learning and the ambition of reaching approximately 6.5 million children in India by 2028.

Using outcomes-based partnerships as a backbone, LiftEd is based on 3 guiding principles of innovation, collective action and systems change.

With $20 million in funding, LiftEd involves a coalition of over 26 partners and operates through 3 complementary instruments:

• The development impact bond (DIB) that supports partners who are training key government staff (e.g. block education officers, heads of school, mentors), building their capacity to improve foundational learning for children in public schools across grades 1-3, driving impact at scale through a systems-strengthening approach.
• The EdTech Accelerator that supported partners to develop high-quality, contextually relevant education technology (EdTech) products for children ages 4 to 10 from low-income communities, reaching children at home and unlocking the power of technology.
• The District Education Innovation Challenge (DEIC) that fosters an outcomes-focused orientation within government and aims to improve foundational learning and numeracy outcomes by incentivizing system actors through a 'rewards and recognition' approach to adopt innovative practices.

Together, these instruments provide a 360-degree approach to improving foundational learning and numeracy.

While the LiftEd development impact bond and District Innovation Education Challenge take a systems-level approach to strengthening what happens within the public education system and schools, the EdTech Accelerator complements this by extending learning into the home.

All 3 LiftEd initiatives use outcomes-based partnerships:

• Under the Development Impact Bond, an impact investor provides upfront funding to implementing organisations to deliver interventions. The investor is then repaid with a moderate financial return by philanthropic outcome funders based solely on the implementing organisations’ achievement of pre-agreed, independently verified outcomes.
• The EdTech Accelerator ran for 2 years, providing grants to EdTech organizations to develop products for remote learning for children from low-income communities. Year 2 scale-up grants were linked to partners’ performance against goals set in year 1.
• The District Education Innovation Challenge, funded jointly by the government and philanthropy, uses non-financial rewards and recognition to incentivize districts to adopt innovative foundational learning and numeracy practices and to improve learning outcomes, with districts ranked based on their foundational learning and numeracy performance.

4 advantages of outcomes-based partnerships

By aligning incentives, funding and expertise around a common goal of improving foundational learning, LiftEd’s outcomes-based partnership model has enabled 4 key advantages that support stronger education delivery and results at scale:

1. Adopting a systems approach: Systems change is complex, nonlinear, long drawn and cannot be achieved by any one partner. LiftEd’s collaborative model has helped move beyond fragmented interventions by bringing together partners’ complementary strengths in education delivery, systems strengthening, monitoring and evaluation.
2. Focusing on outcomes: By centering all partnerships around a common definition of measurable foundational learning and numeracy competencies, verifying these through rigorous independent evaluations, and aligning incentives toward these competencies, LiftEd has strengthened accountability, collaborative problem-solving and continuous learning.
   • In the Development Impact Bond, outcome funders pay only for results, investors are repaid based on performance and implementers carry reputational stakes. Ensuring all partners have ‘skin in the game’ creates a sharp focus on achieving end outcomes. This has encouraged codesigned solutions, joint accountability and data-driven adaptation throughout implementation.
   • Similarly, the District Education Innovation Challenge has created a sharp focus and prioritization of 21 indicators cocreated with the government to reflect a mix of inputs, outputs and outcomes (including foundational learning and numeracy as well as socio-emotional competencies) with a corresponding technological system to collect, validate, analyze and use the data on these indicators.
3. Mobilizing diverse forms of capital: LiftEd has seen diverse capital stacks come together—commercial capital, aid, philanthropy, corporate social responsibility and public finance—all functioning within their own boundaries while complementing each other and filling any funding gaps.
   • In the Development Impact Bond, corporate social responsibility funding was used for outcome funding to comply with domestic laws while aid and global philanthropic capital were used more flexibly for program design, evaluations and risk premiums in addition to outcomes funding. Catalytic and flexible philanthropic capital, including that provided by partners such as the Maitri Trust, helped to attract domestic corporate social responsibility funding.
   • In the District Education Innovation Challenge, philanthropic capital financed technical assistance while the government funded evaluations, rewards and recognition. This flexibility was critical in putting together the $20-million outcomes fund and ensuring LiftEd was well resourced at every stage of its lifecycle.
4. Sharing and managing risk more effectively: Collaboration in any form—and especially via outcomes-based financing—enables risk-sharing among multiple partners instead of one organization shouldering the entire responsibility for success or failure. This encourages partners to support innovations, to pool resources and expertise and to coordinate efforts toward shared outcomes, ultimately resulting in greater efficiency and collective impact. This is particularly important when working at scale within government systems where uncertainty is inherent.
   • In the LiftEd Development Impact Bond, implementors secured upfront funding while transferring performance risk to the impact investor, Bridges Outcomes Partnerships. This allowed them to focus on delivery, innovation and achieving outcomes.

From collaboration to cocreation: Key learnings

LiftEd brings together philanthropy, corporate social responsibility funders, implementers, evaluators and government around shared outcomes.

While working across such a diverse group is not without challenges, its experience has highlighted 4 practical lessons for development partners and countries on how to build and manage partnerships that deliver shared outcomes:

1. Invest time and effort in creating consensus around shared outcomes: This is prerequisite for any large, multi-stakeholder initiative to ensure everyone is pursuing a common goal with pre-agreed targets, definitions and measurement systems. While this step can sometimes lengthen the design and set-up phase, this needs to be seen as an investment in future success that builds the shared understanding needed for more effective and coordinated action.
2. Act as cocreators, not just funders: Effective collaboration requires partners to move beyond a traditional donor role and to actively engaging in problem solving and decision making. Across both the LiftEd Development Impact Bond and District Education Innovation Challenge, funders, implementors and government actors jointly developed the evaluation framework and established a robust yet operationally feasible third-party verification process combining in-person observations and document checks across a manageable sample size. This helped ensure that verification remained rigorous while being grounded in system realities and responsive to the practical constraints and risks of third-party evaluation in real-world school settings.
3. Establish clear governance structures: Long-term, multi-stakeholder initiatives requires clear governance structures, defined roles and responsibilities, shared monitoring reports and evaluations as well as regular reviews. This enables efficient and informed decision making and alignment across stakeholders.
   • Across all 3 financing instruments, the British Asian Trust has played a critical role in bringing together partners with different priorities and expertise, helping to resolve conflicts, monitoring risks and building consensus while keeping decisions focused on achieving shared foundational learning and numeracy outcomes.
4. Root decisions in data: Within LiftEd, data-backed decision making has fostered logical and evidence-led thinking while factoring in ground realities that builds confidence in decisions taken. Several partners, initially skeptical of the strong focus on targets and outcomes, have gradually become strong advocates after seeing the value of data and insights in guiding decisions and course correction.

Meanwhile, after 3 years of program implementation, Cohort 1 of the Development Impact Bond impacted around 562,000 children with students demonstrating learning gains equivalent to 1.81 in equivalent years of schooling (EYOS) in oral reading fluency, 0.37 EYOS in literacy and 0.24 EYOS in numeracy at a cost of approximately ₹559 (US$6) per child (results are reported for 3 of the 4 implementing partners.

One partner’s endline results were excluded due to an external EdTech program that made it difficult to reliably isolate LiftEd’s impact.).

Together, these results highlight the potential of collaborative, outcomes-focused models to drive sustainable improvements in foundational learning and numeracy at scale in countries that faces significant educational challenges.

This blog was developed with contributions from Luke Aspinall, Chief Executive Officer of the Maitri Trust—an anchor funder of the LiftEd program. Relatively new to the outcomes funding space, the Maitri Trust was drawn to LiftEd because of its collaborative approach, focus on outcomes and use of system-level levers to drive meaningful improvements in classroom teaching and learning.

Read also:

• The promise of outcomes-based finance to improve foundational learning in India