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Promoting Microcredit for Women in Mexico   
Carola Conde Bonfil — Mexico March 6, 2008—In a country where the majority of people don’t graduate from high school and scant few attend college, Carola Conde Bonfil of Mexico has achieved the highest levels of education: a Ph.D. In her case, Carola said, it wasn’t hard to beat the odds. Her father, a bookkeeper, was college-educated and her mother, an executive secretary, supportive. The family lived in Mexico City, the capital and home to fully half of Mexico’s colleges and universities. Both Carola and her sister earned advanced degrees. But for Mexicans who live in the country’s vast rural areas and small villages, a good education is harder to come by. Many rural areas offer primary education, but have no high school. And families often prefer to keep their daughters at home than to put them in school past the early years. As a result, despite increased educational investment by the government, many Mexicans are stuck in a cycle of intense poverty. Carola strives to help them lift themselves up. She works on, researches and writes about microfinancing, small loans that aim to enable poor people to start their own businesses. An academic researcher at El Colegio Mexiquense, A.C., Carola is writing her eighth book, this one on microfinancial institutions. “In many villages, the life is very hard because there are no commodities,” such as water or electricity, she said. “So maybe women need to go to a river or a fountain or something like that to bring water to the home or go with the clothes to wash in the river. In some places, the women also work with burning wood to cook because there is no gas in their communities.” What’s more, Carola said, materials used to build homes are so precarious they can’t stand up to earthquakes, tornadoes or other natural disasters. Microcredit, she said, along with training in productivity and sales, can help spur economic activity. Carola is a volunteer for Ámbito Productivo, a microfinancial organization that works in Mexico’s poorest areas. Until recently, the organization helped people establish savings accounts, as most counties in Mexico have no banks. “So people need to save in objects – animals – not in monetary forms and not in institutions,” Carola said. But starting in 2007, the government prohibited nongovernmental organizations from serving as savings institutions, so Ámbito Productivo focuses on bestowing microcredit for specific projects. It also educates people about business, health and nutrition and gender issues. The vast majority of people who receive microfinancing worldwide are women, and it is the same with clients of Ámbito Productivo, Carola said. But, she added, both microcredit and training in gender discrimination are available to men as well.
“Gender empowerment is an important issue,” Carola said. When she wrote her dissertation, she said she looked at the strategies that nongovernmental organizations had for dealing with gender discrimination and related issues. In the world of microfinance, Carola said, institutions must deal with the financial wellbeing of entire families. Otherwise, they can create such problems as domestic violence and a lack of self-esteem among women. “The solution could be worse with microfinance if the program is not designed for gender,” she said. In the fall of 2007, Carola attended CEDPA’s Global Women in Management workshop in Washington, D.C., supported by the ExxonMobil Foundation’s Educating Women and Girls Initiative. The intensive four-week course teaches skills in project management, decision-making, business development, proposal writing, advocacy, strategic communications and monitoring and evaluation. She said she learned how to improve her skills in advocacy and leadership. She said it was particularly useful to discover how different members of a team learn differently, a lesson she planned to take home. Read more about CEDPA's training programs. |
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