The Gender Mainstreaming Scaling Fund – application

NOTE: applications for the Gender Mainstreaming Scaling Fund are currently closed

Did you know that mainstreaming gender not only increases social impact, but also fuels business growth? Gender mainstreaming is not about focusing exclusively on female clients, or hiring more women for your team. Rather, it is a methodology to better understand and accommodate the different needs and expectations that women and men have, be it among your colleagues, on your board, or among your customers. Once you do that, you will see productivity increasing, new customer segments picking up, improved marketing effectiveness, a reduction in churn and risks, and much, much more. In our experience, any social entrepreneur can benefit from mainstreaming gender better into his/ her work, often in significant ways.

Not convinced? Then check how all kinds of social entrepreneurs reported great results after a simple training on the topic here.

The Gender Mainstreaming Scaling Fund, a program by the Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC), PES Latam, LeFil Consulting and Pro Mujer, aims to create this kind of disruptive gender-powered growth in social enterprises. It will do so by training social entrepreneurs in gender mainstreaming and then investing into them for about two years, with increasingly larger amounts, as the ventures progress on their gender mainstreaming journey.

The process

More specifically, selected participating social enterprises will go through the following steps:

Step 1: Gender Mainstreaming Training
The training consists in 3 modules spread over 6 weeks. The training will be delivered in Spanish by Pro Mujer and includes of a mix of self-paced online videos (you can already check them out here) and virtual live sessions where the participants receive personalized feedback from facilitators and peers. By the end, participants will have identified and crafted two concrete initiatives to make their operations more gender-balanced, leading to both increased social impact and business growth.

Step 2: Implementation of strategic gender initiatives
The ventures that successfully finish the training will receive ongoing technical assistance and support by the Pro Mujer team to implement the initiatives they identified during the training. The ventures are expected to mainly invest own resources to carry out the iniviatives. However, limited funding is available, if/as needed, to remove the financial hurdle and cover some hard costs that the ventures are not able to cover internally (“mini-grants”).

Step 3: Bigger investments to fuel gender-powered growth
About 20% of participants – those who show most significant traction after implementing their initiatives – will have the opportunity to access different kinds of investments (conditional grants, hybrid investments, or straight debt/equity) of different ticket sizes (from around USD 15k to USD 350k) from SDC and external investors.

What you need to know before applying

The Gender Mainstreaming Scaling Fund will run from October 2022 to December 2024 and will take on 100 hand-picked entrepreneurs on a rolling basis.

The minimum requirements to participate are:

• The venture is legally registered as an organization
• The venture has a market-based business model (i.e. for-profit activities). If the company has a hybrid business model, more than 50% of the income must come from the for-profit activities
• The venture has already gone through ideation and market-fit stage and shows traction in commercial revenue
• The management team is willing and committed to participate. They see the program as a clear added value for their venture
• The venture operates in one or more countries of Central/ Latin America, with at least 50% of users/ clients/ beneficiaries in the region
• The venture must have a clear social impact. That is its products/ services address a fundamental need among users/ beneficiaries. At least 30% of users/ beneficiaries can be categorized as poor/ vulnerable.

While the Fund has very, very much to offer, and while we have seen previous participants literally ‘take off’ on amazing business and impact trajectories, it also requires a high level of commitment and discipline from the participants. If and when selected, entrepreneurs will be requested to:

• Formally join the Gender Mainstreaming Scaling Fund initiative by registering to a mandatory training cohort (Step 1 above). The training cohorts will spread from October 2022 until April 2023, and participants will be able to choose training dates depending on their availability. The training will be in Spanish, unless participants require special facilitation in another language. It is expected that at least one (co-)founder participates in the training, along with 2 other people from his/ her team. You will be expected to perform the training at high standards, including completion of the exercises in a thorough and timely fashion and participation in all 3 live sessions by all 3 participants.
• Once the training is completed, the participants will be expected to implement their 2 initiatives (Step 2 above) in 9-12 months, investing own time and resources and, if needed and approved, the mini-grant described above. This should be done with focus and diligence, involving the management of the company throughout, even though the Pro Mujer team remains at disposal for inspiration, debugging and advice.
• Larger investment tickets will only be offered starting 9 months after the completion of the training, until mid-2024. As participants get eligible for the larger investment funding, they will be required to prepare and submit documents (financial and other) for the investment negotiations and formalization. Again, while Pro Mujer will support, if needed, with the preparation of those documents, participants will be expected to demonstrate proactiveness, transparency and professionalism. Again, the founder(s) are expected to be actively involved in this phase.
• Last but not least, participants are expected to connect with the Pro Mujer team every 3 months, from the end of their training, until end 2024, to discuss progress and seek support, if needed, on whatever issue they might encounter. Similarly, participants are expected to report on progress of their 2 gender initiatives and selected KPIs every 6 months, from the end of their training, until end 2024, in a timely and accurate fashion.

Application process

If you fulfill the criteria above, and you are ready to invest the necessary time and resources for the training and implementation of strategic gender initiatives, then don’t miss the chance to earn a spot and apply now.

1. Click on the green “apply” button at the top of the page
2. Fill out the application form and click submit
3. Our team will review the application and, if selected, we will send you a registration link for the training with the instructions for the next steps.

If you have any other question, you can contact us at gender@lefilconsulting.com.