In this session, we will explore the main findings, lessons learned and recommendations from the evaluation of the scaling up of Results Based Financing for Community Health Programme, implemented in Uganda by Living Goods. We will be joined by leading experts from Living Goods, Instiglio and USAID.

Since its founding in 2007, Living Goods (LG) has supported nearly 11,000 digitally empowered community health workers (CHWs) to deliver care, improving ability of families to access the treatment and care they need. LG has supported CHWs to go door-to-door in their communities, delivering integrated package of reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health interventions.

Following the successful implementation of a one-year pilot of RBF programme in 2018, funded by Deerfield Foundation in two districts in Uganda, LG decided to scale the RBF to three additional districts, targeting approximately 1,968 CHWs. The RBF scale-up programme, structured as an Outcomes Fund with USAID Development Innovation Ventures, as the anchor outcome payer, began implementation in October 2020 for a duration of 27 months. The programme aimed to drive improved cost-effectiveness and quality of CHWs targeting underserved and at-risk populations. It also aimed to crowd in increased long-term funding for community health as well as support government’s engagement efforts.

The final results showed that the RBF programme led to measurable, scalable, and sustainable improvements in the quality of programmatic data on community health worker performance with Living Goods achieving 93% of expected target on community health workers’ productivity. The evaluation also revealed some areas of further research including exploring ways of improving cost-effectiveness of the verification component of an RBF mechanism and investing in further research to identify suitable ways to measure and incentivise quality of service delivery in RBF mechanisms.

Session participants will have the opportunity to:

- Learn about the scale-up RBF programme and hear from those directly involved in the programme as to their reflections on the lessons learned and recommendations on using RBF to improve performance in community health worker programmes,

- Engage with leading experts in the field to learn about the wider implications of using RBF to improve service delivery in community health worker programmes, and

- Deepen their understanding of when and how to use RBF as an innovative financing approach.