Resources
Through our open-access knowledge products, which span a wide range of topics related to social entrepreneurship and innovation, we make our insights and learnings available to anyone, with the aim to promote inclusive and sustainable development.
Trainings
Our free trainings are designed for social entrepreneurs and other stakeholders within the impact ecosystem.
They provide practical guidance and tools to build and grow solid, innovative and inclusive ventures.
For each topic, we have multiple courses available, covering different levels, target audiences and/or languages. Click on a topic to find the one that is most relevant for you! Follow the prompts to create your free account, enroll and start learning. You can complete the courses at your own pace – simply log back in to resume where you left off.
Leading
with data
Discover the importance of data-driven decision-making, identify your unproven assumptions, and learn how to collect data to validate or challenge them.
Gender
mainstreaming
Discover how gender biases influence your work, and identify opportunities to drive impact and business performance through gender inclusion.
11 tested scaling strategies for social entrepreneurs
Discover different approaches to scale up a venture, and take inspiration from successful real-world examples to create your own recipe.
Community building for your venture
Discover how to harness the power of communities to create value for your organization.
Leading with data
Discover the importance of data-driven decision-making, identify your unproven assumptions, and learn how to collect data to validate or challenge them. Click on each course to discover more details and enroll!
Part I – The fundamentals
Part II – The execution
Gender mainstreaming
Discover how gender biases influence your work, and identify opportunities to drive impact and business performance through gender inclusion. Click on each course to discover more details and enroll!
For social ventures
For investors
For entrepreneur support organizations
11 tested scaling strategies for social enterprises
Discover different approaches to scale up a venture, and take inspiration from successful real-world examples to create your own recipe. Click on each course to discover more details and enroll!
Community building for your venture
Discover how to harness the power of communities to create value for your organization. Click on each course to discover more details and enroll!
Publications
Find a collection of our research reports and insights from some of our past projects, and gain unique insights from our work across the field of social innovation.
Reports
Impact-Linked Finance – From intention to results: A practical guide to invest for inclusive impact (Sep 2025)
In recent years, Impact-Linked Finance (ILF) has emerged as a powerful tool to align financial incentives with positive social outcomes. Yet, many existing ILF structures are complex to implement and slow to scale, leaving many possible adopters hesitating about how to put the concept into practice. Our report cuts through this complexity and provides a practical guide to putting ILF to work.
Entrepreneurial models to promote healthcare access for underserved populations (Dec 2024)
Lack of access to essential healthcare remains a pressing issue globally, affecting nearly half of the world’s population. The Swiss Re Foundation, in collaboration with LeFil Consulting, has taken a leading role in addressing this challenge through the Entrepreneurs for Resilience Award (E4RA) programme: As part of this endeavour, from a pool of over 1,000 inclusive healthcare ventures, 26 were distinguished for their innovative approaches to making healthcare more accessible and affordable, particularly for low-income populations.
Gender mainstreaming: a powerful performance lever for both impact and business (Nov 2024)
This study is based on the data collected through the Gender Scaling Financing Facility (GSFF). The facility, designed and overseen by LeFil Consulting, funded by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and supported by Pro Mujer, invested in 135 social entrepreneurs across Central and Latin America for two years. In the process, a wealth of data was collected on the performance journey of these ventures as they were mainstreaming gender into their strategy, operations and daily practices. This wealth of information was leveraged to uncover the business and social impact improvements stemming from implementing gender mainstreaming activities.
A new model to operate and maintain rural water infrastructure in the arid lands of Kenya (May 2023)
In the harsh, arid landscapes of northern Kenya, water infrastructure is crumbling fast: water schemes face a high rate of failure within a few years of construction. Within three to five years, nearly two-thirds of rural water systems become largely dysfunctional. On top of that, at any given time about a third are completely non-functional. This represents a colossal waste of investments and resources, placing already very vulnerable populations at the mercy of even more frequent and severe drought episodes without nearby access to water.
Building markets for local formal pit emptying businesses – Learnings from Uganda and Malawi (Oct 2022)
In developing countries with fast growing cities, sanitation management is a challenge. Only 15% of the urban population is served by public sewage systems, while 85% rely on pit latrines, and hire pit latrine emptiers to periodically remove the accumulated sludge. Pit emptying is often an informal activity, conducted without proper equipment or training, leading to significant health risks and environmental hazards.
In Nepal, community-based management of water systems through local water user committees is very common. While the approach has been widely promoted in the past, the results are below expectations: Currently, around 75% of the water systems are not fully functional. Oxfam decided to tackle this problem and partnered with LeFil Consulting to develop innovative strategies aiming at finding more sustainable approaches.
LeFil Consulting leadership contributed in significant ways to a number of Hystra publications.
Articles
External feature: The hidden filters: How to fix the biases that skew investment pipelines away from women founders (Apr 10, 2026)
In our latest guest article on NextBillion, we unpack how gender bias is embedded across every stage of the investment funnel, and show how targeted, stage-specific interventions can help investors improve both equity and portfolio performance.
Program spotlight: The legacy of GSFF & GSFF+ (Feb 1, 2026)
From its inception in mid-2022 through its close in December 2025, the Gender Scaling Financing Facility (GSFF) and its scale-up version (GSFF+) delivered a compelling example of how gender inclusion can boost business performance and deepen social impact across the impact enterprise ecosystem in Latin America.
External feature: Impact-linked finance should be simpler, and it can be (Dec 21, 2025)
In our guest post on ImpactAlpha, we share how we made impact-linked financing simpler, faster and cheaper through a streamlined, replicable and effective approach.
External feature: A new model for rural water infrastructure in Kenya (Dec 17, 2025)
Our latest guest article on NextBillion shares insights from our project with Oxfam Kenya, where we piloted a new model for operations & maintenance of rural water systems.
External feature: Building sustainable sanitation markets in Africa (Sep 4, 2025)
Our research on the pit emptying markets in Kampala and Blantyre, conducted in partnership with Water for People, was featured on NextBillion.
Secondment spotlight: Strengthening impact measurement in rural Uganda (May 30, 2025)
As part of LeFil Consulting’s commitment to supporting high-impact ventures across emerging markets, our team member, Michal Januszewski, was seconded to OneDay Health (ODH) for 5 weeks to help enhance the organisation’s capacity to measure its impact. ODH runs lean, nurse-led health centres that bring affordable, quality care to underserved rural populations in Northern Uganda, reaching communities often left behind by traditional health systems.