We’ve brought on a team of independent evaluators – the TSIC Consortium – to run a learning and evaluation programme of our blended finance programmes (Flexible Finance, EESIP, Cost of Living and Enterprise Growth for Communities) until the end of 2027.
Their job is to evaluate how our programmes are working, what impact they’re having, and what lessons can be shared more widely. Because many of these programmes are still ongoing, the evaluation will produce a series of outputs over time, as more data and insights become available.
The paper we’re publishing today is the first of those outputs. Written by the TSIC Consortium, it’s based on a light-touch literature review – a natural starting point before diving into the detail of our programmes. By scanning the evidence that already exists on blended finance performance globally and in the UK, it helps to set the scene for the evaluation and highlights where the big gaps in knowledge remain.
Access is also working to build the evidence base around blended finance in other ways, such as in our role as the cofounder and co-convener of the Blended Finance Collective. The Collective is designed to serve as a knowledge-sharing hub for blended finance practitioners, investors, donors and other stakeholders. Building the evidence is also about listening to key actors, and ensuring research on blended finance is useful to them, serving not only theory but more importantly practice.
As part of the Evaluation and Learning Partnership, Access has set up a fund to enable social investor partners to collaborate and shape research projects each year related to blended finance. Our partners chose ‘capacity-building’ as their first theme and the two winning research proposals include a project seeking to understand better what VCSEs receiving blended finance might most value and need in terms of financial capacity-building and another seeking to identify how to identify, value and equitably deliver non-financial support as social investors.
This paper, ‘Blended Finance Evidence – Evaluating an Emerging Field’, introduces blended finance before exploring how it has been evaluated to date and what evidence is still missing. It’s aimed at the VCSE and social investment ecosystem, and while it’s geared towards people who are newer to blended finance, there’s also plenty here for more experienced practitioners – especially in the section on evaluation approaches.
Below, Leonora from the evaluation team has pulled out a few of the key themes the insights paper looks at.
Are we closer to understanding the impact of blended finance work at a global and UK level?
When blended finance emerged as an approach, blending philanthropic or public funding with private capital to finance social and environmental impact, it was seen as a way to plug the trillion dollar annual funding gap in the Sustainable Development Goal agenda. A few decades on and with healthy volumes of blended finance of over $250 billion in the last ten years, there is a need for more rigorous evaluation of how blended finance has performed. This is explored further in the insights paper.
At the global level, development finance institutions have been key drivers of blended finance with the goal of increasing leverage, obtaining appropriate financial returns and achieving developmental impact (i.e. measurable social, environmental and economic impact). However, there is limited publicly shared evidence on development impact, which is a potential barrier for mobilising further impact-seeking capital. Challenges in evaluating blended finance arise from the novelty of the approach as well as the lack of transparency and fragmented disclosure. Field-builders such as Convergence agree that common standards, metrics and tools need to be designed to help evaluate and assess different interventions. Global blended finance knowledge sharing and practice groups can catalyse action here.
In the UK, the picture is different. Blended finance has played a distinct role, helping to build the social economy by using grant alongside repayable finance to make it more affordable for VCSEs (Voluntary, Community-led and Social Enterprises). The purpose of blended finance has been more about bridging a financing gap in the social economy rather than mobilising capital towards the sustainable development goals. The impact of blended finance in England is framed therefore as contributing to growing the social economy in deprived areas, increasing investor participation in the social investment market and better tailoring capital to the needs of VCSEs in deprived areas or VCSEs led by marginalised communities. For Access, concepts such as ‘reach’ and ‘resilience’ are key, as can be seen throughout its recent impact report.
The TSIC Consortium Learning and Evaluation Partnership aims to build on earlier reviews into the use of government subsidy for blended finance, external evaluations of Access’ programmes as well as Access’ own monitoring, evaluation and learning, bringing together qualitative and quantitative data across its blended finance programmes to help to further strengthen the evidence base for what works. Whilst on different paths, practitioners involved in developing the UK and global evidence bases for blended finance can be in dialogue and learn from each other.
What is clear is that energy, collaboration and transparency is required across blended finance financial and impact reporting for this approach to start to achieve its potential.
After an open tendering process, Access appointed The Social Investment Consultancy (TSIC) and its consortium members including Enabling Outcomes and Leonora Buckland Consulting, as its multi-year evaluation and learning partner, in May 2024. The partnership assesses the impact of its blended finance programmes, act as a critical friend, and build shared learning across the portfolio. It combines evaluation, learning and research to strengthen practice and fill evidence gaps in the UK social investment market, with this Insights Paper as the first in a wider series of outputs.
Written by the TSIC Consortium, this Insights Paper is the first in a wider series of outputs as part of a multi-year evaluation and learning programme to assess the impact of our blended finance programmes.
