| Engaging with Evidence | Scaling and sustaining impact: Lessons from the Cameroon Kangaroo Mother Care DIB

After our summer break, the Engaging with Evidence series returned with a deep dive session on lessons learnt from key stakeholders of the Cameroon Kangaroo Mother Care DIB.

The Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) Development Impact Bond (DIB) was launched in February 2019 to improve neonatal health outcomes in ten public hospitals across five regions in Cameroon through the delivery of quality Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC). Addressing the high rate of under-five mortality in Cameroon, KMC is an intervention for saving and caring for infants by administering continuous skin-to-skin contact, breastfeeding, and early discharge from hospital with follow-up. As the programme came to an end in September 2021, those involved in the delivery of the programme undertook a multi-stakeholder learning exercise to reflect on the DIB’s decision-making and governance structures, data and learning mechanisms, financial structure, management systems, and how to sustain impact after the DIB.

In this session, we explored what the key lessons were for the stakeholders involved in this programme, what results were achieved, what comes next after the DIB, and what this might tell us about the potential to use outcomes-based approaches to introduce and scale social interventions.

Resources

Case study: Cameroon Kangaroo Mother Care Development Impact Bond (Government Outcomes Lab)

Report: Cameroon KMC DIB end of programme report 2018-2021 (Social Finance)

[French version]: Obligation à impact sur le développement pour la MMK au Cameroun 2018-2021 (Social Finance)

Report: Changing Lives, Changing Systems: Building routes to scale (Social Finance)

Blog: Scaling and sustaining the impact of a development impact bond programme – what does it take? (Laura Bonsaver, Government Outcomes Lab)