Programme

Poverty underpins many of the outcomes governments seek to improve, from education and mental health to homelessness, driving and reinforcing disadvantage in a self-perpetuating cycle. Our goal for presenting at the GO Lab Social Outcomes Conference will be to leverage the evidence generated by these programmes to drive policymakers, NGOs, and other local authorities to adopt and scale similar programmes in their area of work.

A growing body of evidence is testing different forms of direct financial support, including unconditional cash transfers and other flexible funding models, across varied populations and contexts. These approaches examine not only whether financial aid improves outcomes, but where, for whom, and through what mechanisms it is most effective. Compared to more conditional programmes, flexible financial support can be simpler and cheaper to administer, restore dignity and agency, and, given poverty’s cross-cutting effects, offer the potential for broad, cost-justified improvements.

The Welsh Government has run world leading trials, providing basic income for care leavers and personalised budgets for prison leavers; the latter run in conjunction with Greater Change. In doing so, they have not only navigated the practical challenges of delivery, but also the political barriers associated with commissioning and implementing seemingly high-risk interventions.

Both programmes involved robust evaluation and required the government to navigate a complex procurement process for these novel forms of financial aid. This session will bring together perspectives from:

• Mark Drakeford, former First Minister of Wales and a key sponsor for both projects, who can speak to the political and institutional challenges of commissioning and backing programmes that can carry a perception of high-risk.
• Jonathan Tan, CEO of Greater Change, an NGO delivering personalised budgets across nearly 3 dozen local authorities in the UK and the delivery partner for the Welsh personalised budgets programme and the Test and Learn programme run in conjunction with MHCLG and the Centre for Homelessness Impact.
• Professor Michael Sanders, Director of the School for Government and the Cash Lab at King’s College London. Michael has been a part of robust evaluations of numerous research studies on the effectiveness of cash-based financial assistance programmes, including on programmes with the Welsh Government and Greater Change, and will be able to speak on the current evidence base for such interventions. Michael was also the first Chief Scientist of the Behavioural Insights Team (also known as the ‘Nudge Unit’).

Our spotlight session shares the evolution of the Gloucestershire Short Breaks Partnership – a place-based collaboration which began as a post-Covid research exercise and has grown into a £2.5m commissioning and delivery partnership between Barnwood Trust, Gloucestershire Children’s Services, and Gloucestershire VCSE Alliance. Together we are working with 12 providers of Short Breaks activities to test new approaches to funding, commissioning and learning that expand disabled children and young people’s choice, voice, and access to meaningful local provision.

The session focuses on how we have enabled innovation, collaboration and gathering learning in a way that shares power and keeps the beneficiaries of the service at the centre. A year-long pilot with six projects has already had a significant impact: reaching over 600 disabled children and young people of whom three-quarters had never accessed these services before; igniting conversations about the importance of early-intervention, and showing improvements to key policy areas such as school readiness, mental health, and family wellbeing. Our learning has shown that how you fund and commission has as much impact as what you fund and commission.

Our evaluation approach has combined qualitative research, routine (co-created) monitoring and a facilitated community of practice, supported by our independent learning partner, Collaborate. This has created conditions for shared sense-making, real time-adaptation, and building trust that has allowed all parties to be vulnerable, strengthening the insights we have been able to generate. At the same time, the Partners have had to cede control, tolerate uncertainty, and be accountable to providers and families – shifting the traditional power dynamics between funder and funded.

A distinctive feature of the programme is that it operates alongside a live procurement process. Navigating this context has surfaced tensions familiar in public innovation: compliance versus learning, competition versus collaboration, and evidence as both assurance and catalyst. With a year to go in the Partnership, these experiences are already forming the foundation for future work together – including a potential social outcomes partnership, where system-level collaboration, adaptive governance and working together to deliver specific outcomes will be crucial.

Our session will share what has enabled progress, where tensions have emerged and what we would do differently. We argue that intentionally designed learning environments (where the goal and commitment are clear) are essential to civic infrastructure and enable commissioners, funders, and communities to rethink risk, redistribute power, and work differently in complex systems.

Health professionals are the backbone of the health system. Particularly in underserved and resource-constrained settings, achieving Universal Health Coverage will be impossible without a sufficiently trained and motivated health workforce. Despite this, low levels of job satisfaction and motivation remain a persistent challenge, undermining job retention and the quality of care. In Sub-Saharan Africa, between 26% and 68% of health workers report dissatisfaction with their jobs.

Against this backdrop, the Ethiopian experience with Performance-Based Financing (PBF) offers an example of a partnership that combines contractual accountability with flexibility. PBF was introduced in Ethiopia in 2015, in collaboration between the public sector (federal, regional and zonal health authorities), Cordaid (an international NGO), health facilities and community-based organisations. It was first piloted in the pastoralist Borana Zone and subsequently scaled to an additional five zones and two city administrations. Agreements with health facilities were laid down in formal contracts, setting out clear performance metrics, transparent financing flows and mutual accountability, while allowing autonomy and flexibility in implementation. The application of PBF has led to major improvements in the accessibility and quality of care. However, evidence of the effects on health worker motivation, satisfaction, and retention was so far limited.

In 2025, a mixed-methods study was conducted, comparing 451 health workers from Borena Zone (working under PBF for 4 to 10 years) to 456 of their peers in the neighboring South Omo Zone, where PBF was never implemented. Multilevel conditional logistic regression was employed to examine the association between PBF exposure and motivation, satisfaction and intention to leave. Qualitative data from key informant interviews and focus group discussions were used to explore underlying mechanisms.

Long-term PBF exposure turned out to be strongly associated with higher motivation [90% vs 63%; p < 0.001] and satisfaction [96% vs 80%; p < 0.001] of health workers, and with a lower intention to leave [14% vs 28%; p = 0.001]. Improvements were observed across intrinsic and extrinsic domains of motivation, including recognition, opportunities for advancement, fair compensation, and working conditions. Qualitative data supported these findings, highlighting that enhanced accountability, clear performance frameworks, teamwork, community recognition, and professional pride were underlying drivers. Increased workload and delayed incentive payments were reported as challenges.

These findings highlight that PBF, when designed as a genuine, trust-based partnership, can enhance health workforce performance and deliver transformational impact. This evidence is relevant for other countries that are currently exploring the (re-)introduction of PBF.

How do SOPs work in a context where the public sector is already strong, (relatively) decentralised, and well-funded? This presentation shares practical lessons from Denmark and DSI’s work over that last six years. It will show how SOPs are used in practice in a universal welfare state, what makes the Danish context distinctive, and what other governments, commissioners, and intermediaries can learn from it. Participants will gain three key insights.

First, the session will show how the structure of the welfare state shapes the SOP market. In Denmark, municipalities finance and deliver a large share of welfare services and have taxation powers of their own. This creates a different enabling environment from more centralised systems and helps explain how a growing SOP market has emerged without relying heavily on centrally funded outcome funds. Denmark’s experience suggests that the development of SOPs depends not only on financial instruments, but also on institutional design, local fiscal autonomy, and the way responsibilities are distributed across government.

Second, the presentation will unpack the structural barriers SOPs can help overcome. In Denmark, one of the biggest challenges is that the costs of prevention are often borne by one part of government, while the fiscal and social benefits are realised elsewhere and over a longer timeframe. The session will show how SOPs anatomy can help address this “wrong pocket” problem. In that sense, SOPs are not only contracts; they are governance tools that help move partner-ships from transactional to transformational.

Third, the session will explore what role government-backed intermediaries can play in building durable outcome eco-systems. Denmark shows that return-seeking private capital can be welcome and valuable, bringing discipline and potential scale, but it is not a precondition for a functioning SOP market. An independent public actor like DSI can in-stead help embed an investment mindset across the public sector, align stakeholders, and support the shift from pilot projects to mainstream adoption. This matters because the ultimate goal is not simply to launch more SOPs, but to use them to modernise public services, improve incentives, and pave the way for reforms that are better aligned with out-comes and people’s real needs.

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of when central outcome funds are necessary, when they are not, and how governments in universal welfare states can use SOPs as a practical tool for systems change, cross-sector partnership, and better public sector decision-making.

Outcomes-based financing (OBF) programmes can generate powerful opportunities for both service delivery and system-wide learning in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Yet many LMIC contexts lack the “ideal” enabling conditions often considered necessary for successful OBF implementation. Ecorys’ research identified five key preconditions for launching OBF, known as the "DREAM" framework: Demand from government, Readiness and availability of data, Economic and political stability, and Market capacity. This session explores how OBF can still be launched effectively when these conditions are weak or evolving, while also generating evidence that informs policy, strengthens systems, and supports long-term impact.

Drawing on lessons from the Sierra Leone Education Innovation Challenge (SLEIC), one of the world’s largest education outcomes funds, the session will combine insights from Ecorys’ research on the DREAM framework with emerging evidence from SLEIC’s evaluations. Speakers will examine how adaptive programme design, embedded learning agendas, and government partnership enabled the programme to operate successfully in a low-income context while producing a robust body of evidence on learning outcomes, intervention effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, and the wider "OBF effect" on stakeholder behaviour and government systems.

The session will also highlight how the Education Outcomes Fund (EOF), research partners, and the Government of Sierra Leone are working to translate evidence into policy and practice beyond programme implementation.

The session will bring together perspectives from funders, implementers, evaluators, and government partners to explore how OBF models can align incentives around sustained outcomes while enabling flexibility, continuous learning, and cross-sector collaboration. Discussions will highlight practical insights on measuring success in complex real-world settings, using data and performance management to drive adaptation, embedding system-level indicators alongside outcome metrics, and navigating trade-offs between rigour, operational realities, and long-term institutional change.

Drawing on evidence and implementation experience from India’s Skill Impact Bond (SIB), LiftEd Development Impact Bond (DIB), Haryana Early Literacy DIB, and the emerging Skills Outcomes Fund, speakers will examine how outcomes partnerships can strengthen accountability, improve learning and employment outcomes, and support more adaptive, government-owned systems at scale.

The session will also reflect on India’s transition from pilot initiatives to system-level adoption through the launch of the Skills Outcomes Fund, considering what capacities, partnerships, and governance mechanisms are required to embed outcomes-based approaches within public systems.

Over the past few years, we have witnessed a data and digital revolution. This roundtable will explore how data-driven tools and emerging technologies — including AI-based models, blockchain-enabled contracting, and data dashboards for monitoring and performance management — can support different stages of outcomes-based contracting. The session will focus on showcasing the “art of the possible” while critically discussing whether and how these tools can help reduce costs, improve public service delivery, and address common operational bottlenecks. We will also examine the governance of these tools, including how to ensure that they remain fair, transparent, and equitable representations of reality (rather than reinforcing existing inequalities). Grounded in real-world practice, the session will bring together practitioners with direct experience leading cross-sector partnerships, who will share the day-to-day challenges they encounter in delivering outcomes-oriented contracts, while another group will demonstrate how different technologies could help respond to or alleviate those challenges.

Earlier this year, NPC published Impact UK, the most comprehensive picture of the UK's impact economy to date. At £428bn in gross value added, roughly 15% of GDP, the sector is larger than almost anyone had previously estimated. That number matters. But it naturally led to questions about what 'counts' in the impact economy. Answering that question for the purpose of understanding scale is one thing. But it is also important when deciding what capital instruments, institutions, and policies are needed to support organisations with different financial structures.

This presentation helps to guide those decisions by splitting the impact economy into five distinct segments, each with their own unique financing and infrastructure needs. By distinguishing between grant-sustained charities, investable social enterprises, purpose-led businesses, co-operatives, and the commercial economy, our segmentation provides policymakers, practitioners and academics with a simple heuristic to inform how to partner with different types of organisations, and grow the positive impact of the economy.

This session brings together researchers and practitioners to discuss how to develop theoretically informed and empirically testable research agendas in the space between formal and relational contracting in the delivery of public services. The session will feature short presentations drawing on different theoretical and empirical perspectives, highlighting emerging evidence, identifying gaps in current knowledge, and reflecting on lessons from applied settings.

The participation and contributions of practitioners will be valuable in considering how we move ideas from “the lab” into real-world settings. The session will include a structured discussion where session participants will be invited to help shape a focused research agenda by considering which questions are most pressing, what kinds of data and research designs are needed, and how theoretically informed research can be more closely connected to ongoing contracting practices.

The aim is to move towards a clearer and more cumulative research agenda on how formal and relational contracting mechanisms interact, substitute, and complement one another in the delivery of public services.

This interactive session will be an opportunity to find out more about the latest projects and innovations in the outcomes-funding landscape and connect with the practitioners leading these initiatives. We will kick off with elevator pitch style presentations from each of the selected initiatives, followed by three rounds of table discussions - a bit like speed dating, but for outcomes funding innovators. Each of the presenters will lead a discussion table, where participants will have the chance to ask questions, make suggestions and offer their support.

Primary prevention (PP) offers one of the greatest untapped levers for improving social and economic outcomes, yet most nations organise systems and spending around crisis response rather than preventing harm before it takes root. My work asks a simple question: how do we design national architectures that solve problems before they occur, particularly in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life? The National PP Framework, developed from and with civil society partners, is the only civil society led national primary prevention framework globally, and together with the Prevention Nation Strategy sets out a “middle system” approach between macro policy and frontline practice.

The Framework identifies ten core conditions and enablers, “healthy soil” and “architecture”, that must be held together if PP is to become a national organising principle rather than a passing theme. These include hope, shared vision, trust, First Nations knowledge, community led incremental reform, lived experience at the centre of policy design, cross government collaboration, innovative long term funding, storytelling that can move systems, and adaptive evaluation focused on what works for families now. Around these, we have developed a practical Prevention Nation System: six processes that distinguish systems that react to crisis from those that grow social cohesion, wellbeing and productivity. This includes the essential component of a time limited role for intermediary organisations as part of establishing PP.

To embed at scale, we propose three institutional shifts: establishing a PP Convening Office in a central department of government to steward the ten conditions and enablers; creating a Future Avoided Costs function within that office to shift investment from late intervention to prevention; and ensuring a line between this central architecture and communities so that locally generated incremental reforms can be translated into system change. This work, currently being piloted with Australian jurisdictions and shared internationally through UN and NYU CIC prevention platforms, offers a concrete pathway for countries seeking to move from admiring the problem to changing the pattern, and to treat primary prevention as seriously as other national priorities such as defence.

What does a crowded kitchen share with transforming a disability benefit service? The same hidden dynamics that determine whether outcomes are delivered or derailed. In this 90-minute hands-on workshop, a Department for Work and Pensions service designer draws on a live benefit transformation case study to introduce a structured diagnostic method that reveals where relational friction, formal constraints, and external pressures collide.

The workshop unpacks a real-world challenge: aligning internal policy teams, digital delivery, and an external assessment provider while navigating conflicting test-and-learn pilots, ambiguous policy mandates, and fixed delivery deadlines. You will follow the same diagnostic process that helped unblock conflicting findings, consolidate duplicated effort, and inform a feasible cohesive launch roadmap.

Working on paper, you will build three artefacts:

1. Systems Map: Stakeholders, organisational nodes, influence flows, and levers of control layered on a single page.
2. Persona: The citizen at the end of the policy, with needs, fears, and motivations.
3. Trends Analysis: Political, economic, social pressures and trends shaping the implementation environment.

The critical moment: You arrange these sheets in a triangle and draw connecting arrows. How does each external trend reshape the citizen’s experience? Which levers can you pull, and where does power sit? The invisible relationships become visible, clarifying the path forward.

Why it matters: The method directly addresses the formal–relational tension that defines cross-sector partnerships. It filters complex landscapes through three interdependent lenses, ensuring that accountability structures and adaptive collaboration are assessed together. After each section, you pause and apply the same diagnostic to a live project of your own. You leave with a completed diagnostic triangle, a sharper view of your own partnership dynamics, and a repeatable framework you can use with your team.

Format: Pen-and-paper, facilitator-led, with dedicated application pauses. The facilitator will walk the room to unblock thinking and support adaptation to your context.

You leave with your own project’s map, and a clearer understanding of what to address first.

How can we use Outcomes Contracts to drive long-term sustainable integration across health systems to reduce health inequities?

This interactive practitioner workshop will interest policymakers, practitioners, service users, those working across the voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise (VCFSE) sectors, intermediaries and investors seeking more equitable and sustainable models of collaboration.

It will introduce the Neighbourhood Transformation Fund (NTF) model, which demonstrates how statutory and non-statutory bodies can co-develop services that address local priorities through a locally owned, place-based vehicle. The NTF model has been developed by Macmillan Cancer Support and Social Finance with Learning Partners King’s College London (KCL).

The NTF model is designed to deliver a scalable pathway for system transformation, defining a new role for national charities as investors and partners to fund and facilitate change, acting as ‘anchor’ organizations within local systems. It seeks to show how social investment can stimulate innovation, delivering tangible benefits for health systems by reducing demand and increasing capacity.

NTFs are being piloted in several sites across the English NHS delivering targeted services around Pro-active Anticipatory Care for frail elderly patients and programmes to support High-Intensity-Users of health services – with more services in the pipeline.

Proposed session structure:

• Introductory overview of the problems that the model seeks to resolve, a discussion of the current health and social care context, and an outline the key components of the NTF idea from the KCL Learning Partner team.
• This will be followed by reflections from the Macmillan and Social Finance teams – digging into early learning and honest reflections about the set up and operationalisation of the NTF model across pilot sites.
• We will then break out and explore a selection of challenges and opportunities linked to the model in small groups – facilitated by the KCL, Macmillan and Social Finance teams – to generate deeper discussion and participant interaction.
• There will then be the opportunity for each small group to feed back to the wider room, developing an open forum for debate and exchange of ideas.
• Finally, the session will conclude with reflections from invited independent experts with relevant UK experience (e.g., Sara Allen) and international experience (e.g., Chih Hoong Sin) commenting on lessons that NTFs may hold for future use beyond the pilot sites.

Overall, the session will provide practical insights on how cross-sector partnerships based on outcome-based funding models may embed VCFSE organisations in service design and delivery, thereby strengthening locally led, participatory decision-making.

Public procurement is one of the largest discretionary levers governments hold to shape social outcomes, yet debate around it remains dominated by legal and compliance frameworks. The OECD's recent report Buying Social with the Social Economy articulates a double dividend argument: public resources can simultaneously procure quality goods and services and generate measurable social outcomes when channelled through social economy actors. The European Commission's mid-term review of the Social Economy Action Plan reinforces this direction. Realising the potential, however, requires a profound shift from contracts as compliance instruments to contracts as outcome-generating partnerships, echoing Prof. Petersen's call to place people at the centre of contracts.

This roundtable brings together academics, policymakers, and practitioners working at the frontier of public social procurement to examine what this shift requires in practice. We will explore two interlocking dimensions.

First, social procurement as a strategic lever for social outcomes. Several jurisdictions stand out for treating procurement as central, rather than peripheral, to social policy and for working to track the outcomes it generates. South Korea, Scotland, Victoria (Australia), Kenya, and Quebec each offer distinctive approaches. Drawing on contributors to the OECD report alongside policymakers from Europe and South Korea, and insights from the Open Contracting Partnership and the Open Government Partnership, the panel will surface lessons about institutional design, data infrastructure, and the cultural shifts that successful approaches demand.

Second, outcomes-based mechanisms that bridge intent and evidence. We will share the experience of South Korea's Social Progress Credits (SPCs), which illustrate how an originally private-sector experiment can be institutionalised in public systems. Following Jeju Province's 2024 ordinance, the model has scaled across six local governments, and a March 2026 partnership with the Ministry of Employment and Labor extends performance-based social value rewards to fifteen metropolitan and provincial governments. SPCs offer a practical mechanism to measure and reward social value in purchasing relationships, moving public and corporate buyers from social intent toward evidence-based procurement.

By placing mindset, mechanism, and measurement into conversation, the session aims to surface a shared research and practice agenda for the next phase of public social procurement, one that genuinely balances formal and relational practices and translates the language of social value into operational reality.

This interactive session will return to one of the foundational themes of the Social Outcomes Conference: How do we institutionalise outcomes and amplify the impact of outcomes-oriented partnerships?

Building on discussions at previous editions of the conference, we will focus on some of the active ingredients and approaches that can nurture partnerships that are accountable, sustainable and able to deliver public value at scale. We will do so by grounding the discussion in specific examples from practice across the globe (Colombia, South Africa, Kenya, the UK, the US and many more), bringing in voices from the public sector, foundations, delivery and social innovation organisations, and academia.

The session will examine the enabling conditions and the roles governments, philanthropic funders, intermediaries, and service providers can play in sustainaing long-term collaboration under conditions of political and operational complexity. Rather than presenting partnerships as purely technical arrangements, the workshop will focus on the institutional and human dynamics that determine whether collaboration succeeds in practice: aligning incentives across sectors, building government ownership, adapting models to political and implementation realities, and maintaining accountability while enabling innovation and flexibility.

Governments invest substantially in evaluation infrastructure on the premise that better evidence produces better decisions. But this relationship is not linear and is shaped by the governance architecture of both the evaluation systems themselves and the wider decision-making environments in which they are embedded. These "rules of the game" parameters significantly influence how evaluation knowledge is acted upon — how systems learn from evidence and adapt their practices in response, such as scaling or abandoning pilots. This session examines this underexplored but critical dimension of evidence-based policymaking, asking what governance conditions are needed to translate robust evidence into better outcomes.