We Know the Development Finance System is Broken for Girls. Here’s a Blueprint to Fix It.
Progress in ensuring adolescent girls realize their full potential is fledgling across Africa, where metrics of progress have tragically stalled. Projects designed to ensure they are protected from violence, teen pregnancies, HIV infection, and child marriage and improve their life chances are not reaching girls at the scale they need.
Consider this brutal reality: one in four girls becomes pregnant before turning 18. Maternal mortality and HIV are still the leading causes of death for girls and young women in the region, and six million girls aged 10-19 are out of school because of pregnancy.
Why are we still here? Because changing norms takes patience and innovation. The dominant finance model is rigid, fragmented, and donor-led. Short-term projects are designed with targets that rarely reflect girls’ realities. When these lose funding — a certainty with the recent collapse in global health spending, growing misinformation and intensifying attacks on reproductive rights — services dry up. Girls pay the price.
Yet there exists an opportunity within the development finance system, not just a promise to solve this deeply entrenched structural problem but to transform it through performance based models. Models that pay for outcomes, not inputs. Mechanisms that attract private and philanthropic capital by de-risking it. And transparency through real-time data, so we stop wasting money on programs that don’t work and scale those that do. Our blueprint rests on five principles:
We must fund outcomes that tackle the most urgent issues girls face, through integrated care pathways to combat the threat of teen pregnancy and HIV.
Use data to continuously adapt, and drive accountability on real outcomes achieved, ensuring investments are optimized to achieve the life-changing outcomes for girls for their years into adulthood.
By implementing pooled funds across private, philanthropic and public partners, we share risk, and create the financial muscle necessary for sustainable long-term programs.
Critically, the blueprint ensures governments opt-in by co-paying, embedding local ownership and guaranteeing interventions are focused on girls’ needs and ring-fenced into budget spends.
This is no longer theory: a testable, replicable design now exists. In Kenya, Tiko implemented an early version of this outcomes-based model, integrating contraception, and HIV care, delivering over 1.8 million services for $20 per girl. This proven blueprint requires that we fund outcomes for girl centric care urgently and with intention. The time for deliberation is over. We need to usher in a revolution in girls' sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing funding. This is an opportunity to take this proven, sustainable path to scale, to stop failing adolescent girls who keep having their access to care denied.
We need to build on this success to protect girls’ futures. This urgency is palpable: In Kenya, 15% of girls will be pregnant before they turn 18, while in South Africa, 1,000 adolescent girls and young women account for new infections with HIV each week, slamming the door on opportunities before they even have a chance to push them open.
To combat this, we’ve launched the Girls’ Outcomes Platform, with Bridges Outcomes Partnerships in collaboration with the Made Possible By Family Planning Campaign, allowing governments, philanthropists, financial institutions, and private investors to pool their capital with a single, crucial mandate.
This platform flips the traditional development finance mechanism on its head. Tiko, already a proven leader supporting thousands of girls across Africa, has previously used this model as pooled capital to deliver integrated programs-all designed through understanding the lived experience of girls facing extreme poverty. We have joined forces to shape the sector at a much larger scale.
The game-changer? Donors only pay after results have been delivered and verified. Instead of rewarding intentions, we reward tangible, life-changing outcomes, eliminating program stagnation and delays ensuring full accountability.
This blended mechanism of shared costs through different investment portfolios and reduced risk is an invitation for a range of funders old and those new to girls' health and wellbeing looking for partners with the technical expertise for direct implementation.
The Girls Outcomes Platform comes at a critical moment for global health. As traditional donor funding declines and political headwinds threaten contraception access worldwide, we are building a new, resilient funding model. Tiko, working with Bridges Outcomes partnerships, has already proven that impact comes when the focus is on outcomes.
This approach turns fragmented, short-term projects into long-term, results-driven investments in girls’ futures. We know it works because it builds on previous development impact bonds and in the era of focus on blended finance, this offers the opportunity for embedding interventions within domestic budgets and government buy-in. We are working with local government leaders who are interested in creating a new path in Kenya and South Africa, demonstrating this easily replicable financing model is ready for scale.
Research from the World Bank and the Population Council shows that every dollar invested in adolescent girls can yield up to ten times that amount in economic benefit. The platform leverages those returns, giving investors a rare opportunity to see their capital drive development while ensuring measurable impact.
Across the world, too many girls’ lives and futures depend on whether they can access sexual and reproductive healthcare. This is not abstract policy; it’s about agency. When we speak to girls, they tell us that this integrated care offers them the freedom to learn, work, and contribute to society. This is the future they want.
The global development community stands at a critical juncture where smart investment for girls can unlock large returns. By 2050, sub-Saharan Africa will host a third of the world’s adolescent girls. Their future will define the continent’s prosperity — and the world’s. Governments and donors should commit now to outcomes-based funding that guarantees every girl access to care, education and opportunity. Anything less is not empowerment; it is abandonment.