Working for Women Worldwide - Embassy of the United States

Success Story
Microenterprise
Lifting Women Out of Poverty
Some of the biggest gains in the status of
women come from the smallest of projects.
c Such is the case with microenterprises,
generally defined as an informally organized
business with 10 or fewer employees that
zis owned and operated by someone who is poor.
Throughout the developing world, U.S. support for
these ventures has markedly improved the lives of
ordinary women, often lifting them out of poverty.
Take Fatouma Dijbril Issifou, who runs a vegetable
stall in the town of Parakou in the West African
nation of Benin. After receiving two loans totaling just
$390, slightly more than Benin’s per capita gross
national income, from a local nongovernmental organization
(NGO), she was able to increase her profit
margin by buying vegetables in bulk at a lower cost.
Those profits have transformed a previous hand-tomouth
struggle for daily existence into a life that now
enables her to buy sufficient food for her three children
and pay for their education.
In the Russian town of Otradniy, Tatyana Panova
has used her two loans from the Foundation for
International Community Assistance to purchase the
foodstuffs necessary to expand her home-based business
selling baked goods and full lunches to local cafes.
Thanks to the profits earned through this thriving
enterprise, Panova’s daughter is now able to attend
technical college.
And in Mexico, Baulia Parra Pruneda leveraged a
microenterprise loan of $150, about 2.5 percent of
Mexico’s per capita gross national income, to purchase
the supplies necessary to launch a sewing business.
Through the proceeds she earns selling more than 100
articles of clothing a week, she now is the breadwinner
for her family of eight and has installed running water
and a second floor in her home in the city of
Monterrey.
Such success stories are a reason why, for the past
three decades, the U.S. government, through its foreign
assistance programs that support NGOs and
host-country institutions, has placed a high priority on
this brand of bottom-up development efforts encouraging
entrepreneurship that help the poor—particularly
poor women—help themselves.
In June 2003, Congress reaffirmed its commitment
to microenterprise development by passing legislation
that directed the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) to fund microenterprise
activities at the level of $200 million for Fiscal Year
2004. These activities benefit women in particular: In
2003, women constituted two-thirds of loan clients of
USAID-supported microfinance institutions.
Reflecting on the growth of U.S. support for
microenterprise, Emmy Simmons, USAID’s assistant
administrator for economic growth, agriculture, and
trade, says: “Microenterprises account for a substantial
share of total employment and gross domestic product,
and they contribute significantly to the alleviation of
poverty. They are often the chief economic defense of
the most vulnerable households. As the predominant
source of income and employment for hundreds of
millions of people worldwide, the microenterprise sector’s
influence on individuals, households, and national
economies is clear and profound.”
Women are disproportionately represented in the
microenterprise sector. Across the developing world,
the representation of women employed in the informal
economy ranges from 58 percent in Latin America to
84 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of these
women do home-based work or street vending—they
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