Topic Guide: Meeting the challenge: How can enterprise challenge funds be made to work better

Abstract

Enterprise challenge funds are widely used in the development landscape, in the past 15 years alone a number of donors have spent approximately £850m on this aid modality. A large proportion of this spend has been disbursed through challenge funds in social sectors (such as the massive £355 million Girls Education Challenge) - but our focus here is the type of funds which have private sector grantees that are intended to create jobs and incomes. This topic guide seeks to explain: the evolution of challenge funds; the conceptual rationale for their use; their use in practice; findings on the effectiveness of challenge funds; and how the lessons learned should inform future challenge funds This report concludes that the monitoring and evaluation material generated by challenge funds has been extensive - but not entirely helpful