Jackfruit Finance and Instill Education Pay For Results School Lending

Intervention

Social or environmental challenge

Due to failures of the Kenyan public school system to provide enough school facilities to meet domestic need, private primary school establishment and enrollment has grown rapidly in Kenya, doubling from approximately 5,000 students enrolled in 2010 to 13,700 enrolled in 2018. However, this has not necessarily corresponded to better educational outcomes; less than 50 percent of Kenyan girls in third grade can do second grade level math, English, or Kiswahili. Moreover, there has been little institutional support provided to these schools to help them improve their ability to effectively teach children. Challenging economic conditions mean that most school owners providing affordable education opportunities for children and youth often choose to prioritize expenditure that keeps school facilities open and available, and not those which would improve learning outcomes for students such as teacher upskilling.

Description of the intervention

Jackfruit Finance and Instill Education will partner to launch a study of an innovative, results-based financing mechanism that will aim to support improvements in learning outcomes within Kenyan primary schools by facilitating access to interest rate reductions in loans for educational providers. The Outcomes Based Accelerator will enable this partnership to scale this model with data on its impact.

Jackfruit Finance has a proven record of financing low fee schools in Kenya, achieving a $1.7 million portfolio in 9 months and maintaining excellent repayment rates. Jackfruit is expanding geographically and engaging investors, including high net worth individuals, venture capital funds and private banks, while aiming to partner with development financial institutions for further growth. We anticipate working with over 2,000 schools within 3 years.

Instill Education is a Pan-African, private higher education institution accredited by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training and has been in operation since 2015. In late 2021, Instill Education launched an online professional development platform for teachers, Upskill@Instill, in collaboration with the Mastercard Foundation. Through direct partnerships with Ministries of Education in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa, Upskill has reached a user base of 60,000+ users within a little over a year.

Last data update

Data for this pipeline project was last updated in August 2024