Picture a development programme at its most familiar: a crowded workplan, a blizzard of activities, a monthly report that reads like a supermarket receipt. Workshops. Stakeholder meetings. Toolkits. Pilots. Another “rapid” assessment that takes three months.

Everyone is busy. Everyone is helpful. And yet, five minutes after the programme ends, you start to wonder: what, exactly, will still be working? Not what was delivered. What will be owned, used, funded, improved, without you.

That question is where Results Mega Buys (RMBs) came from. Noticing a stubborn pattern: the difference between programmes that happen and programmes that stick is rarely effort. It’s focus.

The idea in a sentence

An RMB is a high-leverage result, a change that is disproportionately likely to shift a system at scale, and endure, so worth backing that you organise the programme around it.

The “buy” language is deliberate. Every programme spends scarce things: time, political capital, relationships, credibility, attention. RMBs force an uncomfortable but productive question:

If you could only “buy” a handful of results with all that scarcity, which ones would you choose?

“Isn’t this just the 80/20 rule?”

Inspired by it, yes. Captive to it, no.

The 80/20 principle is often misused as a magical numeric law. RMBs treat it as a leadership discipline: a minority of actions often drives a majority of outcomes, so choose the minority on purpose.

In practice, most programmes do the opposite. They let the portfolio form through a thousand sensible decisions: respond to a request here, add a small workstream there, keep everyone happy everywhere. The result is a programme that is perfectly calibrated to be busy and poorly calibrated to be memorable.

Results Mega Buys (RMBs) are the opposite move: fewer bets, clearer bets, better protected bets.

Building on Rachel Glennerster’s “Best Buys”… and going one step further

RMBs are indebted to Rachel Glennerster’s work on “Best Buys”, the idea that we should prioritise interventions with the strongest evidence of impact and value for money. That approach improved development practice because it asked: what works?

But evidence is necessary, not sufficient. In the real world, especially in reform and institution-building, you also have to ask:

• What could work here, now, with this political window?
• What would change behaviour and incentives, not just processes?
• What will still be funded and used when the programme leaves?

RMBs sit at the intersection of evidence, ambition, and delivery reality. They’re not always the biggest activities; they’re the most system-shifting results you can plausibly lock in.

So what does an RMB look like?

Not a training. Not a strategy document. Not even “capacity building” (unless it changes the system).

An RMB usually has three fingerprints:

1. It changes the rules of the game (laws, incentives, decision rights, budgets, performance management, market structure).
2. It creates a flywheel (early gains build confidence, confidence builds adoption, adoption builds further gains).
3. It is designed to outlive you (embedded in routines, institutions, data systems, staffing, and domestic funding).

If your “result” relies on your consultants turning up forever, it isn’t a mega buy. It’s a subscription.

How to organise a programme around RMBs

Here’s a practical way to do it without turning your logframe into a philosophy seminar.

1) Start with the end that endures
Before you list activities, define the enduring state you want: what ministries will do differently, what markets will enable, what the state will stop doing by default. Write it plainly enough that a non-specialist can understand it.

2) Identify the ‘vital few’ results
Pick a small number of outcomes that genuinely “move the needle”. Use evidence (Best Buys thinking), but add political economy: reform coalitions, veto players, sequencing, windows. Then make a choice.

If everything is a priority, nothing is.

3) Build a portfolio, not a single bet
RMBs work best with a simple classification that keeps teams honest:

• Results Mega Buys (RMBs): the transformative bets you will protect and resource properly.
• Standard Results: credible, necessary reforms that build foundations and momentum.
• Blue Sky Results: ambitious pathways worth initiating now, even if the full prize is beyond the programme horizon (with milestones that are achievable).
• Empty Bucket Results: the deliberate space for emerging opportunities, and the discipline to say “no” to low-impact distractions unless they unlock something bigger.

This isn’t bureaucracy. It’s a way to stop accidental portfolios.

4) Fund the scaffolding, not just the headline
The “lock in” work is unglamorous: governance, training, manuals, data architecture, institutional roles, budget lines, dashboards, comms, legal hooks. RMBs fail when we pay for the rocket and forget the launchpad.

5) Measure what matters, then tell the story simply
If you measure outputs, you’ll get outputs. If you measure outcomes, you’ll get arguments about attribution. RMBs insist on a middle ground: track credible milestones that show the flywheel is turning (usage, compliance, decisions made differently, budgets allocated, processes institutionalised).

And communicate it like a human. One sentence: “This reform is now how the system works.”

The uncomfortable truth

RMBs won’t make everyone happy. Focus never does. But it will make your programme legible, to partners, to funders, to your own team. It will also make it more likely that, when the programme ends, something important keeps going.

Because legacy isn’t what we deliver.

It’s what they keep.