Equity by Design in Outcomes-Based Financing for Early Childhood Care and Education
Set my timezone
Select a timezone from the map or dropdown and click the Set timezone button to adjust the event date/times to your current timezone.
Join the second in a two-part webinar series from our Collective Learning Initiative (CLI) to explore what it takes to embed equity meaningfully within outcomes-based financing for early childhood care and education (ECCE). Through policy, financing, and implementation perspectives, this session highlights the risks, trade-offs, and design choices that determine whether OBF reaches marginalised children, or excludes them.
Session Overview
Outcomes-based financing (OBF) is increasingly being explored as a way to improve effectiveness, accountability, and impact in early childhood care and education (ECCE). Yet OBF approaches are not neutral: without deliberate attention to equity, they risk reinforcing existing exclusions, particularly for children with disabilities and other marginalised groups.
This webinar explores what it means to embed equity by design within outcomes-based financing for ECCE. Rather than treating equity as a technical safeguard or add-on, the session focuses on how assumptions, incentives, and power relations are built into financing models from the outset. It examines how different framings of disability and inclusion shape outcome definitions and indicators, how domestic financing choices and data systems influence who is reached, and what equity-conscious OBF looks like in practice under real-world constraints.
Through presentations and a moderated discussion, speakers will surface risks, trade-offs, and practical design questions to support policymakers, funders, and practitioners in using OBF in ways that support inclusion rather than exclusion.
Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of:
- Why equity in OBF is a design and governance choice, not a technical afterthought
- How outcome and indicator selection can actively shape inclusion and exclusion in ECCE systems
- What financing, data, and implementation features matter most for reaching marginalised children
Speakers
- Ella Wright (International Education and Development Specialist) and Catherine Batamuriza (Education and Inclusion Specialist) who will examine how different understandings of disability and inclusion influence outcome definitions, indicators, and incentives in OBF systems.
- Dr Michelle Neuman (Senior Fellow at Results for Development and Research Affiliate at Yale Inclusion Economics), who will highlight what current funding patterns and data gaps mean for equity.
- Siree Jongdee (Associate Director, Equitable Education Research Institute), who will present a practical case study from Thailand’s Equitable Education Fund, sharing lessons from implementing and evaluating outcomes-based contracts in early childhood development.