At Building Bridges 2025, gender inclusion took centre stage with the launch of two powerful publications by LeFil Consulting, based on extensive data collected by the Gender Scaling Financing Facility and the Inclusive Impact-Linked Finance Facility. These efforts are designed to reshape how social entrepreneurs and investors think about gender: not as a compliance goal, but as a driver of performance and scalable impact.

Unlocking growth through gender-smart performance management

For over a decade, LeFil has supported social entrepreneurs to scale their innovations through access to capital, technical expertise, and networks. Yet across geographies and sectors, the same pattern emerged: many promising ventures were held back by “gender blindness” — the failure to recognise how gender norms and biases influence leadership, hiring, product design, and customer reach.
 
To test whether addressing this could unlock business growth, LeFil launched the Gender Scaling Financing Facility (GSFF), embedding gender considerations into strategy, operations, and measurement across 135 social ventures in Latin America.
 
The outcomes were clear:
– Yearly revenues grew by 35%,
– User reach expanded by 68% yearly,
– Female leadership increased by 18% yearly, and
– Overall staff satisfaction rose by 20% yearly.
 
Every dollar invested generated nearly $43 in additional revenue, demonstrating that gender inclusion is not only fair, but it is also commercially smart. The strongest gains came from internal changes such as leadership and hiring practices, though benefits also extended across supply chains and customer engagement.

A new framework for inclusive finance

Building on this success, LeFil launched the Inclusive Impact Linked Finance (ILF) Facility: A next-generation financial instrument developed with the support of Swiss development cooperation. The model is designed to accelerate and lower the cost of financing for social impact entrepreneurs who often struggle to access affordable capital through traditional, profit-driven mechanisms.

This ILF Facility flips the logic of conventional finance: the more measurable, inclusive impact an entrepreneur delivers, the more favourable their financing terms become. Central to this model is adopting a gender inclusion lens, ensuring that impact and opportunity grow together.

As LeFil’s Managing Director Jessica Graf explained, gender is “the most powerful form of inclusion — it touches half the world’s population and cuts across every sector”. By structuring financial deal terms around gender, this ILF Facility becomes inherently relevant and replicable across regions and industries, providing a practical tool for building fairer, faster, and more inclusive capital markets.

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The launches at Building Bridges 2025 underscore a growing recognition that gender inclusion is not an add-on — it’s a performance lever that expands markets and multiplies impact. Through evidence-backed business cases and frameworks, LeFil and its partners are helping the finance community move beyond awareness to actionable solutions that reward inclusive growth. As the sustainable finance ecosystem evolves, these models offer a clear message: removing bias unlocks opportunity: for entrepreneurs, investors, and society at large.