As the use of impact bonds continues to grow, we ask whether results-based financing mechanism are able to fulfil their promises.

At the end of 2018, the world had seven development impact bonds (DIBs) and more in the pipeline. Yet questions remain about the potential of DIBs—still a new financing instrument—compared to other pay-for-performance arrangements. With a dearth of standard and transparent evaluation met...

In 2013, a CGD working group signaled important benefits of development impact bonds, and worked through some of the “how-to” of design and implementation. Yet five years later, only three development impact bonds have launched.

OPIC recently announced it will invest $2 million in a Development Impact Bond (DIB) aimed at improving the availability and quality of cataract surgery services in Cameroon. 

After more than a decade of operations, MCC has made the shift from innovative start-up to established donor agency.  “MCC NEXT,” the agency’s new, much-anticipated strategic plan, takes a hard look at how the poverty and development landscape has evolved over the past decade ...

No one said creating development impact bonds (DIB) was going to be easy, but that hasn’t stopped the development community from trying to get them off the ground. The Fred Hollows Foundation, based in Australia, has been hard at work on a DIB to address cataract blindness in Af...

When designing and implementing Social Impact Bonds (SIBs), practitioners and policy innovators in the developing world will inevitably face the challenge of understanding and adapting SIBs to each government’s legal jurisdiction.