Teacalco, Mexico — A $140 loan enabled Irma Rojas Ayala to start a business out of her home making and selling doughnuts and tamales in this rural village about an hour and a half northeast of the capital.
Rojas' earnings have bought her a new washing machine and clothing for her three children. Now, she is thinking beyond her kitchen. The fledgling entrepreneur is studying for a high school diploma and dreams of opening a bakery or full-service restaurant.
"I feel happy. Independent," said the 30-year-old, who said she was rebuilding her confidence after her estranged husband beat her so savagely when she was pregnant that she lost their fourth child. "My family can see the change in me."
Rojas obtained her seed capital from Pro Mujer, a small, new microcredit organization in Mexico.
She is one of an estimated 100 million people, mostly women, around the world who have access to microcredit programs that typically provide very small loans, training and peer support to the poor to help them start or expand self-employment projects.
Pro Mujer, the nonprofit group whose name in English means pro-woman, provides entrepreneurship training that teaches borrowers to recognize value in themselves as well as their businesses.
The program also helps bring basic health services such as cervical exams to women who routinely put other family members first.
Pro Mujer in April received a $3.1-million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which recognized that boosting the skills and earning potential of women, the primary caregivers, is key to breaking the cycle of poverty in developing nations.
"Poor women in Latin America are very much second-class citizens," Lynne Patterson, co-founder of the organization, said in a telephone interview from Pro Mujer's headquarters in New York. "We are committed to helping [them] develop their human potential as much as their economic potential."
A former elementary school teacher in Long Island, Patterson started what would become Pro Mujer in 1990 after moving to Bolivia with her husband, who had been transferred there on business. She found work as a consultant, providing child development training to women who were receiving food aid for their youngsters through a government program.
Patterson said she soon discovered that her clients didn't want handouts but a way to earn their own money. Most desired self-employment but lacked capital and basic skills such as bookkeeping.
