In a country with interest rates over 11% , one NGO has provided interest-free microfinance loans in Mexico since 2010 empowering indigenous Zapotec entrepreneurial women to jumpstart their microenterprises. Despite a deep trust deficit in financial institutions, the non-profit Fundación En Vía, enjoys 99% loan repayment rates within 15 weeks or less.

“We are the first and only interest-free micro-finance non-profit in Oaxaca with a unique business model that combines business education with responsible tourism to empower Indigenous women entrepreneurs who have the skills and need someone to believe in them,” says Managing Director, Viviana Ruiz Boijseanueau, a Mexico City native and architect by training who left her lucrative career to devote herself full-time to the social justice program that began with a commitment to alleviate extreme poverty among Indigenous population, but evolved to focus on empowering women to discover and develop their skill set to “build brighter futures for themselves and their families.”

Boijseanueau oversees five full-time employees and 20 volunteers on average including tour guides worldwide. Founded in 2010 by Oaxaca-native Carlos Topete and an American Emily Berens, Fundación Emprende, Intercambia y Aprende A. C.–known as Fundación En Vía–evolved to a refined social enterprise model based on Grameen Bank micro-loan model “with a twist.” Since convincing the Zapotec women entrepreneurs to join En Via was challenging Topete decided to offer more than a steady flow of tourists buying their handmade products.

To create a responsible, sustainable program, En Vía evolved to offer interest-free loans to all the women entrepreneurs in need. To be sustainable Topete offered the women “basic business classes, not rules” on business and money management and slowly built positive relations based on trust, connections, and a deep commitment to those who had business ideas and skills–but lacked financial means.

In empowering the women En Via combines microfinance and tourism with a nonprofit organization–providing a deserved basic human right. While Topete and Berens now live and work abroad, they remain board members.

Three Women Solidarity Model

En Via banks on its “education tools and trust on the women” to be responsible loan recipients. This empowerment Boijseanueau believes boosts the women’s self-esteem.

En Via has supported over 800 indigenous women entrepreneurs across six Tlacolula Valley communities in the Oaxaca, Mexico region through donations and income from responsible tourism trips, . Of those, 600 women have successfully secured independent businesses or left the program to pursue other interests. One of these is Teresa Hernandez Lopez whose sister, a beneficiary, encouraged her to join in 2015 to scale the chocolate and dried chilies business she had started in 2009 in her home. En Via business courses taught her how to name and brand her business, customer relations, and product display while engaging with other women entrepreneurs to share challenges while learning. In 2023 Teresa left En Via to manage her El Guajillo store where she continues selling various handmade products.

Currently supporting 200 women businesses–from weavers to livestock and vegetable farmers, to food producers, clothes makers, to storefront owners–the micro-finances help sustain self-employed women who fulfill the required prerequisites and basic principles. Loans are exclusively earmarked for groups of three women entrepreneurs needing to expand their microbusiness. The “solidarity model” jump-starts businesses for women who lack credit history or collateral and defies the gender gaps in financing which exclude women even though women loan recipients have higher repayment rates than men and dedicate most of their income to their household.

Once the team of three completes eight money and business management classes, they sign a contract as a commitment to repay before receiving a loan of 1,500 pesos ($78). All three women must use the loan exclusively for their business and generate income to contribute to the payback–within 15 weeks–before qualifying for a second loan. Mandatory monthly classes equip recipients with the core business concepts of developing, marketing, and presenting their small businesses to a regular flow of responsible tourist groups. Social media training introduces online marketing and new sales avenues, leading many women to build Instagram accounts and offer digital payment options.

After receiving the first loan, most women create additional projects to maintain the circular, sustainable financing–and on average receive at least four loans per year. Traditionally, families in Oaxaca set up collaborative, family businesses that scale as older members, preserving traditional techniques, pass on their cultural skills keeping the knowledge within the family. Most women generate enough profits to afford schooling for their children, savings, and additional ideas to enhance their profit.

Impressed by En Via’s success and its value for the women (primarily Zapotecas), Wellesley College Spanish and study-abroad Professor, Carlos Vega, was intrigued by the NGO’s ties to the Instituto Cultural Oaxaca Spanish language program. Convinced that the program could represent ideal teaching opportunities for his students, he arranged the first study abroad language studies between the two institutions–three Wellesley College students have already completed their internships.

“Wellesley is renowned for ‘women who make a difference in the world’ and I saw in En Vía an outstanding opportunity to learn more about microfinance, sustainability, and responsible tourism, and offer opportunities for our Spanish majors wanting a fully immersive experience in a Spanish-speaking country but who could not study abroad for a full semester or year,” says Vega.

Teotitlán del Valle Village

En Via’s 5-hour responsible tourism trip [$90/pp], brings tourists to respective business sites managed by the women beneficiaries. A 19-mile drive southeast of the color-bursting Centro Historico of Oaxaca de Juarez, the bustling outskirts give way to flat, open plateaus of the Tlacolula Valley district. By the foothills of the Sierra Juárez mountains, the small village of Teotitlán del Valle (Land of Gods in Náhuatl, Aztec, language), is the first area town founded by the Zapotecs where legend says the Zapotecs crossed the Picacho mountain, looked down from its peak, and chose to settle in the valley below. 

The village’s Zapotec and Spanish-speaking indigenous population are known for their generational pre-Hispanic weaving traditions. Throughout centuries, they incorporated loom and wool yarn weaving traditions, introduced by the Spanish, to create unique motifs across handmade wool tapetes (rugs), bags, table runners, coasters, and other accessories.

En Via beneficiary, Brenda Martinez’s local restaurant sits amidst her tree-lined yard hugged by a two-story, multi-generational residence. Brenda, her husband, mother-in-law, and four children help scale the business throughout her four years with En Via. An organic garden, an artisanal workshop teaching her weaving talents learned from her family, and a traditional Zapotec Cucina restaurant serving meals learned from her mother and grandmother–are all sourced from her gardens and made possible with microloans.  

In the middle of the yard, a long tapetes-covered table, shaded with an orange plastic awning, sits by a soot-darkened brick-walled open kitchen. Brenda’s mother-in-law presses tortillas with a metal presser then dexterously flattens them with her hands before tossing them atop Comal’s smooth metal-surface griddle, balanced atop vertical cinder blocks. Brenda’s husband lines the table with large pitchers of juice, baskets of warm tostadas wrapped in handkerchiefs, and an assortment of spicy dips. Soon warm bowls of delicious Cegueza–a Zapotec hoja santa-flavored chicken soup with a broth of toasted, cracked corn arrive.

In preserving her centuries-old practice of extracting pure pigment colors for wool dying, Brenda eagerly demonstrates her rows of nopal cactus leaves hung across the far end of the open-air kitchen wall. Covered with cochineal scale insects, she harvests and sun-dried pulverized female scale insects, which turn into natural red dye for the wools she uses to make bags, tapetes, table runners, blouses, and other artisanal items for sale. Some 70,000 insects make one kilogram of the sought-after dye after they are dried and finely ground in a metate basalt stone grinding slap.

Preserving the traditional crafts and cultural heritage of the Zapotec communities in the Tlacolula Valley En Via’s “Celebrate Culture: Nurture Creativity” campaign engages the young women artisans to continue their ancestral family weaving workshops and diversify into new market trends by capitalizing on the generational talents of the undervalued elderly women to actively pass their expertise to the new generation of cultural preservers.

Driving out of Teotitlan, off a beaten road, we stop by one of the first En Via beneficiaries, Yanet Bazan Chavez, and her husband’s weaving business. Pregnant with her second child, Yanet has been with the program for 15 years and now grows various plants used to dye the wool and teaches dying workshops.  The couple has also built an environmentally sustainable, solar Airbnb accommodation afforded from the profits.

Sitting against a wall of colorful displays of her handicrafts, Yanet explains in English how she set up a wool dying and weaving workshop. As a former En Via employee, she used her loans to fund her jewelry business at first and then reinvested the profits to fund her college education. She now designs jewelry using wool–and makes bags, pillow covers, rugs, runners, and more.

Across the display wall a row of looms thumps away as Yanet’s husband continues to weave. Behind the looms a small, blue-tiled pool is surrounded by trees and hanging plants potted in recycled plastic containers. The couple is now building a brick entry into their workshop.

For the last six years, Hermelinda, another beneficiary has used loans to expand her weaving business. She now has four looms and a permanent booth in downtown Oaxaca from where she sells her products on Sundays. Standing in her yard where her crafts are displayed on clotheslines and hangers, she says she used her loans to purchase wool for tapestries, bags, ponchos and other clothing items she creates.

Her husband, mother-in-law, and sons help make some of the products–she’s invested part of her profits in purchasing an industrial sewing machine to sew her leather-strap wool tote bags with silver clasps. Her husband handles the digital payments standing under the colorful rows of crafts hung across their yard.

On a friend’s recommendation, Beatrice joined En Via nine years ago. Standing beside her small, partially covered barn, and piles of garlic bunches on the ground, she says she used her first loan to purchase sheep to sell the wool to the local weavers. After repaying she invested her second loan in purchasing pigs and cows.

Now she sells the Oaxaca queso cheese, and in a nearby farm harvests beans, garlic, and alfalfa which she feeds to her sheep and cows. She and her husband harvest 800 bundles of garlic, twice a year and have a successful wholesale garlic business–selling one bundle for 100 pesos (about $6).

“The most important thing is how women even during the pandemic went on to start new businesses because they possess higher skills–they just need someone to believe in them and provide them with secure funds,” says Boijseanueau. “What’s more the children of our recipients grow up proud and more confident witnessing their mothers achieving new levels of success in businesses and financial independence.”