In 2022, Pro Mujer expanded its geographic footprint and opened its first office in Guatemala City, with the objective of promoting gender equality and providing holistic and comprehensive support to empower Guatemalan women.
Throughout its first year of operations, Pro Mujer has reached more than 2,500 people through its holistic model, focusing on three main objectives: enabling women’s financial inclusion, expanding their access to health services, and providing them with skills development opportunities.
One year later, the impact achieved allowed the organization to celebrate a new milestone, the opening of its second branch in Tecpán! The Pro Mujer Guatemala team and its users got together to share an inspiring day.
“Pro Mujer has been working for more than 33 years to advance gender equality in Latin America, a trajectory that has pushed us to spread our wings in search of new challenges. In 2022, we landed in Guatemala with the certainty that we could transform women’s lives with our products and services and guarantee their holistic wellbeing. With this inauguration, we continue to strengthen our commitment to Guatemalan women,” said Denia del Valle, country representative in Guatemala, who was accompanied by Manuel Fuentes, the financial services manager in the country.
A Brief Tour of Pro Mujer’s 2023 in Guatemala
The promotion of financial inclusion is essential to the empowerment of women and the growth of their businesses.
Pro Mujer offers individual loans and a mobile wallet, which lets users deposit and add funds from their cell phones as well as make transfers and pay for services. These financial mechanisms have become one of the most effective tools for breaking poverty circles, as they enable access to capital for microentrepreneurs who are excluded from the formal financial system.
Guatemalan women have found entrepreneurship to be an effective way to become economically self-sufficient: The region of Latin America and the Caribbean has one of the highest female business start-up rates, with Guatemala (28.2%) leading the world (GEM).
In order to generate an even more tangible impact and boost the productivity of their businesses, Pro Mujer supports MSME owners through skills development opportunities, by means of a continuous training strategy that provides women with information and knowledge essential to making assertive decisions and achieving economic autonomy.
Over the course of the year, hundreds of women have seen gains through Emprende Pro Mujer, an entrepreneurial training platform that allows women to access dynamic and simple content that adapts to each stage of their business.
Through the platform, women acquire digital, leadership, and management skills to take charge of their finances and boost their sales and business. They receive mentoring and personalized follow-ups and are connected to a regional support network.
In order to reach women entrepreneurs with limited connectivity and low digital literacy, Pro Mujer has launched the Emprende Pro Mujer hybrid model, a methodology that adapts to the training needs of the most vulnerable women and implements pedagogical support materials translated into Quiché and Kaqchikel, with the objective of facilitating the learning process for Indigenous women.
So far, this model has had an impact on more than 380 women in the departments of Guatemala, Sacatepéquez, Chimaltenango, Quetzaltenango, Alta Verapaz, Zacapa, Escuintla, El Progreso, Retalhuleu, Izabal, and San Marcos, all places with high social vulnerability.
Pro Mujer celebrates the closing of another great year, where the support of strategic allies such as Target Foundation, UPS, SOSEP, Guatemala Escala, MEDA, Wakami, IOM, IDB Lab, among others, proved indispensable to reaching the aforementioned achievements. The challenges overcome and the lessons learned spur the organization on to look toward the future with enthusiasm. In 2024, we will go for more, writing new chapters in the lives of Guatemalan women!
