CAF funds Pro Mujer IFD for women inclusion and economic empowerment in Bolivia

The year 2022 was crucial for strengthening the relationship between CAF and Pro Mujer IFD, but also to consolidate CAF’s possibilities for funding local-currency operations in Bolivia. A proof of this is the loan granted to the microfinance institution in November 2022 for 20.79 million bolivianos—around USD 3 million—, aimed to finance microcredit operations for some 3,750 resource-poor customers (approximately USD 800 per credit in average), mainly women, with low access to traditional financial services.
The Pro Mujer IFD credit line is designed to be used in both foreign and local currency, in financing operations under the modality of community associations or as individual credits. This operation helped meet the entity’s currency quotas, considering that the cash flow of its customers is mainly in bolivianos.
Pro Mujer IFD has specialized in credit for women, in an effort to support them throughout their productive life cycle. It began operations as a non-governmental organization (NGO) in 1990 and became regulated as a Development Finance Institution as of 2017, and has grown steadily, with a portfolio of over 130,000 customers, of which 72% are women, concentrating its operations in the cities of Santa Cruz de la Sierra (22%), El Alto (18%) and Oruro (12%).
With this agreement, and in line with the CAF Strategy for Gender Equality, which aims to ensure equal opportunities and the empowerment of women and girls through support for public equality policies and gender mainstreaming in different services, we are facilitating Bolivian women’s access to financial resources and promoting their economic autonomy.
CAF also values the alignment of Pro Mujer IFD’s strategic framework with the challenges it has taken on in an attempt to become the Green Bank and the bank of economic recovery of Latin America and the Caribbean. In this connection, Pro Mujer IFD received the 2021 “Resilience” accolade from Bolivian magazine Gente Motivando Gente and the InfoRSE Portal, in recognition of good practices aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals with a “Community Health Promoters” project and the robotization projects of their processes.