By Tim Rogers Nica Businesswomen Prepare for Free Trade MONTELIMAR, Nicaragua – Nicaraguan businesswomen, many possessing an MBA from the school of hard knocks, have become a dominant force in this impoverished country's entrepreneurial sector. Nicaraguan businesswomen own and manage 80% of the country's micro-businesses (five employees or less), and account for 40% of Nicaragua 's Gross Domestic Product, according to Ximena Ramírez, president of the Permanent National Congress of Nicaraguan Bu-sinesswomen. The women represent all sectors of business and trade, from tourism and textiles to mining and manufacturing.
Their success, Ramírez says, is because of their ability to transform survival skills acquired over a lifetime of hardship – including war and natural disasters – into an entrepreneurial spirit. “The Nicaraguan woman is brave, strong, honest, hardworking, inventive and a survivor,” said the efficient and vivacious Ramírez, during the recent II Congress of Nicaraguan Businesswomen. “We women understand solidarity. We were the ones that buried the dead, our sons and our husbands.” The congress of businesswomen, held Nov. 18-19 at the Hotel Barceló Monte-limar, brought together hundreds of entrepreneurs from all over the country to discuss the need for unity in the face of globalization, and the pending Central American Free-Trade Agreement with the United States (CAFTA). Of the five Central American countries participating in the regional trade pact, Nicaragua is expected to be the first to ratify CAFTA, perhaps as early as this month. A recent poll conducted by the Costa Rica-based Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress revealed that 93% of Nicaraguan women believe the government did nothing to listen to their points of view while negotiating the trade pact last year, and 70% say the government has not been transparent about the trade talks. In spite of the skepticism and lack of public knowledge about CAFTA, Nicaraguan businesswomen claim their pasts have helped them to prepare for a future of cutthroat global capitalism – ironically, even when that past is one of socialism. DELIA Saballos, coordinator of the businesswomen's congress in the northern department of Nueva Segovia, said her group is working with Nicaraguan women to revive the Sandinista values of solidarity and cooperative work, while un-teaching the concept of a government-issued free lunch. Saballos claims the women's congress has succeeded in forming cooperatives of tortilla makers and textile workers, which have found collective strength in union. In the rural northern town of Ocotal , the Nueva Segovia women's congress has created a common development fund, which it uses to hold carnivals, attract tourism, promote area businesses and raise more money for the fund. Apart from grassroots fundraising efforts, access to credit for small businesses in Nicaragua is a major obstacle to growth and development, according to business leaders. Zacarías Mondragón, president of the Nicaraguan Council of Small and Medium-Sized Businesses (CONIMIPYME), explained access to low-interest development credit all but disappeared when the government's three state-owned credit banks folded in the late 1990s, during the government of former President Arnoldo Alemán (1997-2002). Mondragón estimates 120,000 small and medium-sized businesses invested with or had loans from the three state banks, which offered credit at a 12% annual interest rate. Current interest rates offered by private banks and financiers are between 20-30%. Nicaragua no longer has any state credit banks, and international debt-forgiveness stipulations prevent the government from opening new ones, Mondragón explained. THE problem is not with availability of funds, but rather accessibility. Nicaragua has received $125 million in donations since last December, according to foreign trade advisor Pedro Antonio Blandón. Most of that money has never made it to the small producers and entrepreneurs who need it desperately. Mondragón insists it is imperative that the government create channels of accessibility to the forthcoming Millennium Challenge Fund, a $100 million development grant for Nicaragua from the U.S. government. If private banks, which are largely inaccessible to small businesses, handle the money, only the well-to-do will have access to the gifted funds, Mondragón warned. EVEN without resources, Nicaraguan women have always been resourceful in business, Ramírez said. Necessity is the reason so many Nicaraguan women started small businesses, and ingenuity and hard work is what keeps them afloat. When the government downsized in the early 1990s, after the socialist Sandinistas were voted out of office, women were the first ones on the chopping block, Ramírez said. The machista culture said that if anyone should work, it should be the man in the family, while the woman stays at home with the children, she explained. As the number of single-parent homes increases, women have been forced to invent ways to make money. Many of the small businesses have failed over the years because of a lack of business management skills. The Nicaraguan women's congress is helping to change that, Ramirez said. The congress, a private initiative that works with government agencies and acts as an umbrella for other non-profit organizations, has worked with thousands of women in the past four years to improve their business management, accounting skills and self-esteem, she said. Now with globalization approaching, and CAFTA waiting in the wings, the women's congress is working even harder to get its strength-through-unity message out to the women of Nicaragua |
