Women's economic empowerment WEE

Gender Scaling Financing Facility

In addition to supporting different organisations, SDC pilots and innovates with the Gender Scaling Financing Facility GSFF and its scale-up version GSFF+ are ambitious initiatives to massively mainstream gender inclusion across the impact ecosystem in Central and Latin America. Between October 2022 and December 2024, the GSFF boosted the growth and impact of 135 Latam-based social ventures, by offering technical and financial assistance to mainstream gender into their strategy and operations. Building on GSFF's impressive results and learnings, GSFF+ amplifies its reach and impact by extending its support to other key ecosystem players, notably investors and entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs), and providing technical assistance through a network of local, specialized and vetted gender consultants.

For the GSFF, gender mainstreaming means identifying all the opportunities that an organization has to improve and promote gender inclusion throughout its work. This does not necessarily or exclusively mean hiring more women, or targeting more female clients, but rather recognizing, understanding and accomodating the different needs, expectations and priorities that women and men have, whether they are customers, employees, suppliers or board members.

GSFF

Run from 2022 until 2024, the GSFF was a long-term effort to embark over 140 social enterprises in the region on a long-term transformational journey to embed gender mainstreaming into their DNA, by mixing technical and financial assistance, with increasing intensity over time. GSFF also collected «before and after» performance data to track how the program drove performance improvements across a large array of metrics, for each venture.

Approach

• Gender mainstreaming training

  A hands-on, facilitated training helped ventures i) gain awareness about their own gender biases, ii) discover the many opportunities they had to reduce such biases and promote gender inclusion, and iii) zoom into a few of those opportunities which they wanted to focus on in priority.

• Implementation of strategic gender initiatives

  By the end of the training, each venture had identified two concrete initiatives to use gender as a business and impact performance lever for their organization. These initiatives were designed to be pragmatic, feasible and strategic, included clear objectives, work plans, budgets, as well as a set of targets to improve relevant performance metrics. Initiatives were selected by each entrepreneur, depending on his/her own priorities, sector and circumstances. GSFF provided both financial and technical support to help ventures implement those initiatives over a period of 6 to 12 months.

  While during the training ventures realized that «more needed to be done», this phase was typically where the true transformation started: by engaging actively with concrete initiatives, and seeing first-hand the impact they can generate, most ventures started to realize the full potential of gender inclusion to drive growth and impact, which often led them to push beyond the initial scope and embrace gender mainstreaming as a core part of their DNA and mindset.

• Access to larger investment to fuel gender-powered growth

  Ventures that achieved good traction on their gender initiatives and showed the «mindset shift» described above were then offered the opportunity to access bigger investments to fund their growth, through a combination of donor funding and private capital from partner investors. We offered a range of investment types and ticket sizes to cover the diverse financing needs of the ventures and also designed hybrid financing mechanisms, where donor funding could be leveraged in flexible ways, linked with the achievement of impact/ gender targets, to incentivize private investments in gender-mainstreamed ventures.

GSFF+

In 2024 and 2025, GSFF+ is extending its support to impact-focused investors and ecosystem support organizations (ESOs) in order to scale up gender mainstreaming across the impact ecosystem in Central and Latin America. For both these groups, GSFF+ offers technical and indirect financial assistance to help them go a step further in incorporating a gender perspective within their own organization and work, and GSFF+ then collaborates to roll out gender mainstreaming across the social ventures that are part of their investment or program portfolios.

Approach

• Assessments, trainings and gender initiative design

  Selected investors and ESOs start by undergoing a 360° organizational assessment and benchmarking to identify all opportunities for gender mainstreaming, both internally and across their investment/ program portfolio. They get access to a training platform with a wide range of practical resources and tools, and participate in 3 live workshops to identify 1-2 concrete, feasible and impactful gender initiatives, including tailored mentorship to jointly craft the approach, work plan and key metrics to track. Investors also have the opportunity to access specialized, cost-effective technical assistance by the r.rise network of gender experts, to receive guidance and support on the implementation of their selected gender initiatives.

• Technical and indirect financial assistance to portfolio ventures for participating investors

  Three companies from the portfolio of each participating investor receive gender mainstreaming support, including assessment and benchmarking, training, support in designing 1-2 gender initiatives, as well as vouchers to obtain technical assistance for the implementation of these initiatives through the r.rise regional network of gender experts. If results from these three pilot investees are positive, investors commit to drive gender mainstreaming for all companies in their portfolio, leveraging the resources offered by r.rise.

• Technical assistance to incorporate gender mainstreaming into programming for participating ESOs

  Each participating ESO receives tailored support to co-develop one or more plug-and-play gender mainstreaming modules for their social entrepreneurship programs (e.g. incubators, accelerators, awards, etc.), and support to pilot module’s implementation in one program of their choice.

Resources for social ventures

GSFF has created a number of tools and resources to help social entrepreneurs start and progress on their journey toward gender inclusion. These include:

• Gender assessment tools

  To help ventures uncover their biggest opportunities for improvement and zoom into the interventions with most potential, two practical assessment tools have been developed: a simple questionnaire-based gender assessment tool that helps ventures assess how they fare across 10 areas based on their current set-up and practices, and a KPI benchmarking tool that compares a venture’s performance on selected metrics with data from other social ventures, and suggests specific areas of intervention to improve performance on metrics that are below the benchmark.

  • Gender Assessment Tool for Ventures

    XLSX51.97 kB1 November 2024

• Gender mainstreaming training

  This online course is designed for social entrepreneurs and impact-driven organizations that want to improve their impact (and business results) by being more gender conscious and inclusive. It will enable participants to identify opportunities for gender mainstreaming within their organization, and develop effective and exciting initiatives to promote gender equity in their work and increase their business and impact performance to unexpected levels.

  The training is available online as a self-paced course, in both English and Spanish.

• Step-by-step recipes to get started on a gender mainstreaming journey

  Gender mainstreaming doesn’t have to be complicated: it is not about launching expensive new projects, but analysing with a «gender lens» how you do things and how you take decisions, and identifying ways to make changes (even small ones) to become more gender balanced and inclusive.

  To provide both inspiration and «how to» guidance, GSFF has compiled a library of resources: for each topic, there is a «step-by-step recipe» on how to go about it (including best practices, tips and expected benefits), as well as one or more case studies from ventures which successfully improved their approach in that particular area.

• Gender-related metrics

  When undertaking efforts to improve gender equity and inclusion, it is important to measure progress, effectiveness and impact across various dimensions, related to both business performance and social impact. To help ventures identify the most meaningful indicators to track, GSFF developed two useful resources: a list of the 12 most relevant metrics for gender mainstreaming initiatives, which includes a shortlist of KPIs that are applicable and relevant across a wide range of gender initiatives; and a gender KPI selection tool, which suggests a broader range of possible metrics to track depending on which type of gender initiative a venture is planning to implement.

Resources for Investors

GSFF is developing a number of tools and resources to help investors interested in boosting their performance and that of their investment portfolio through gender mainstreaming. These include:

• Gender assessment tool

  To help investors uncover their biggest opportunities for improvement and zoom into the interventions with most potential, a simple questionnaire-based tool (below) is available, that helps them assess how their organization fares with respect to gender mainstreaming across 15 areas, based on their current set-up and practices.

  • Gender Assessment Tool for Investors

    XLSX55.59 kB1 November 2024

Resources for entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs)

GSFF is developing a number of tools and resources to help entrepreneur support organizations (ESOs) interested in boosting their performance and that of their acceleration/incubation/training programs through gender mainstreaming. These include:

• Gender assessment tool

  To help ESOs uncover their biggest opportunities for improvement and zoom into the interventions with most potential, a simple questionnaire-based tool (below) is available, that helps them assess how their organization fares with respect to gender mainstreaming across 16 areas, based on their current set-up and practices.

  • Gender Assessment Tool for ESOs

    XLSX57.70 kB1 November 2024

Further documents

Gender lens investing and blended finance for gender equality