WUNRN
LATIN AMERICA - PRO MUJER -
GRASSROOTS WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT
COMMUNAL BANKING, HEALTH,
EDUCATION, SKILLS, RIGHTS, DREAMS
Twenty
years ago, a friendship between two women of different cultures and backgrounds
cemented, and a bond was formed to create a women's development organization --
to empower women -- throughout
Lynne Patterson, an American school teacher, and Carmen Velasco, a Bolivian professor in psychology, wanted to use their shared passion and expertise to help the poorest women in Bolivia achieve economic and social well-being.
Seldom have
cross-cultural partnerships produced such exceptional results. In 1990, Lynne
and Carmen founded Pro
Mujer, a women's development organization that offers credit, access to
savings accounts, healthcare, and training to poor women entrepreneurs in
They began by meeting
women in houses and courtyards in El Alto. Their first task was to understand
how to provide useful training to women in the barrios. These were
semi-literate indigenous women, ages 30 to 40, who were qualifying for food
donations.
Like the women's
consciousness meetings of the 1970's in
With her increased income and savings, Pro Mujer in
Flora Callisaya bought her own land and a house.
Lynne and Carmen
eventually developed a participative process whereby the women reflected on
their own experiences and began to think about their own lives and what they
wanted for themselves and their children.
For example, when
asked, How did your parents teach you? and How are you teaching your children?,
they quickly saw traditional patterns emerging and repeating. "We watched
our brothers go to school, while we stayed home to do the housework."
Lynne and Carmen
quickly realized that their work was nothing short of ending centuries of
racism, social and economic exclusion, and gender discrimination against women.
While they wanted to help provide a better life for the women in the community,
it was the women themselves who asked for help to start or improve small
businesses.
The women's priority
was to generate income which would enable them to provide life's basic
necessities for their families. Lynne and Carmen first developed a training
course in business skills. All the women made business plans.
Once they had their
plans, they asked for credit to put these plans into practice. These women
lacked the education and skills needed to access credit from commercial banks,
but were smart and willing to guarantee each other's loans.
The regular group
meetings provided an opportunity to give women the ongoing training they needed
to develop themselves and their abilities. Microfinance and education became
the means to an end --the empowerment of women, which Lynne and Carmen saw as
the most effective way of alleviating poverty.
To develop Pro
Mujer's unique integrated approach and group-based methodology, Lynne and
Carmen first observed successful microfinance models, including Grameen Bank in
Poverty and health
are deeply intertwined. If a woman or her child falls sick, she will not be
able to run her business or care for her family. That is why Pro Mujer offers
healthcare and health education to clients and their children.
Pro Mujer focuses on
women because they are more apt to use their earnings and savings to better feed
their children, care for their children's health and enroll their children in
school. Women value the services they receive from Pro Mujer and recognize the
vital role of health care and education in making a lasting impact on the
futures of their children.
Pro Mujer reaches out
to women whose income does not cover basic food, shelter, health, and education
needs. These women engage in small income-generating activities such as food
processing, sewing and weaving, shopkeeping, craft-making, and renting bicycles.
Pro Mujer staff provide check-ups through the mobile clinic in
"Credit alone is not enough to lift women and their families out of poverty," explains Lynne. "Just as the poor need access to credit to earn an income, they need access to healthcare and education to prevent illnesses that deplete their savings and wipe out their livelihoods."
Pro Mujer has grown organically in
These women guarantee
each other's loans; if one cannot pay, the others pay for her. The bank's
leaders often recruit other women whom they trust to repay their loans. Such
group guarantees result in low delinquency rates.
The communal banking
methodology of Pro Mujer is best suited for women living right at the poverty
line or below. Women who have only each other's word as a guarantee for
repayment.
A Pro Mujer client helps her daughter with homework in Nicaragua.
Each communal bank
has its own name and identity. It is a grassroots group with its own officers
and agenda. Each group manages its loans; screens members; documents loans;
ensures, tracks, and deposits loan payments; and provides a guarantee for the
rest of the group. The groups meet at neighborhood centers once or twice a
month.
These centers serve
as the nexus of women's financial, health, and educational services. In short,
all interventions needed to move the community forward. Simultaneous to
financial services, women receive health care support and training. They have
access to pap smears at low or no cost.
Cervical cancer is a
leading killer of women in
At Pro Mujer poor
women learn to embrace their strengths and believe in their own abilities. As
one woman said, "For the first time in my life someone believes I can
succeed."
Many of the children
of the women that Lynne and Carmen began to help 19 years ago are currently
studying in universities. Pro Mujer now offers education loans for elementary
and high school education, and has a partnership with the Ministry of Education
in
In the past 19 years,
the organization has disbursed over US$582 million in small loans, and provided
healthcare and training to hundreds of thousands of women and their families.
Pro Mujer's success
stems from its ability to directly address the structural problems of poverty
and the need for employment and social security. It continues to provide health
care where local governments fail to provide it. If the United States cannot
provide adequate health care to its people, one can only imagine the challenges
for countries with fewer resources.
Pro Mujer in Mexico Client Matilde Cruz works with clay.
The
next stage for Pro Mujer is to scale up its services so that it can help
thousands more women in Latin America who don't have access to financial or
health services and lack the support of a strong social network like the one
that Pro Mujer provides.
"We now have
competition in the world of microfinance," Lynne told me. "We must
provide the best services at the best prices, while remaining client-focused
and maintaining our core mission of poverty alleviation and
self-empowerment."
Surpassing Lynne and
Carmen's vision, Pro Mujer is helping some of the poorest women in Latin
America to increase their income, develop their full potential, and claim their
basic human rights, enabling them to become agents of change in their families
and communities.
Lynne and Carmen are
thought leaders and global citizens. They sparked an initiative that has given
thousands of poor Latin American women and their families the opportunity to
live with dignity.
================================================================
To contact the list administrator, or to leave the list, send an email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.