Winnie María Lira Letelier

Winnie Lira organizes and trains poor women microentrepreneurs in Chile to compete effectively in the local and global marketplace.

Winnie recognizes that demand for original, top-quality products is growing as Chilean consumers are presented with more consumer options. Microsized businesses have been unable to compete with large companies and have traditionally suffered from formal barriers like complicated paperwork and licensing. These obstacles have had the greatest effect on women entrepreneurs, whose products are generally considered to be low in quality and appeal. Winnie is encouraging poor women to tap into increasingly sophisticated markets by organizing the women, then training them both to identify new work opportunities and to create competitive advantages for themselves. She emphasizes product value, market penetration, income-generation strategies, and access to government contracts.
After training, Winnie's group of microentrepreneurs innovatively tap into product niches unaddressed by larger firms, and they successfully bid on government tenders. Additionally, by proving that they can maintain relationships with a growing network of clients and compete with large companies, beneficiaries of Winnie's program have begun to influence small-business legislation throughout Chile. As a result of a productive business relationship with government clients, Winnie is helping launch an advocacy campaign to raise national minimum wage rates.

Despite Chile's economic advances since the return of democracy, poverty remains a widespread phenomenon. The 2000 National Social and Economic Survey revealed that 20.6 percent of the population qualify as impoverished. Furthermore, statistics show that women are considered the head of most low-income households, and it is they who suffer most notably from the shortage of family funds. Additionally, like most Latin American countries, Chile maintains a social patriarchy, a condition that hinders women from finding dignified work.
In response to this problem, state-sponsored programs and citizen sector organizations have designed projects to empower women, though they have uniformly been incomplete and nonholistic. On behalf of the state, the National Service for Women supports the strengthening of community organizations, and the Social Solidarity Fund finances microentrepreneur training and mentoring. The training, however, does not deal with the "market entrance" stage,– making it difficult for the beneficiaries to get to the point where they can apply their newly acquired management skills. Moreover, the programs do not include elements for enhancing self-esteem, self-reliance, and decision-making capacity–all necessary to the creation of sustainable women-operated business in patriarchal Chile.

Winnie has developed a model that provides women a tangible way to fight poverty. To join her microentrepreneurial network, members must satisfy three prerequisites: their income must be below the poverty line; their enterprise must employ at least three people; and they must already be producing something. Winnie advises the microentrepreneurs in product design, product development, and production quality–with input specific to each woman's endeavor. All training places emphasis on incorporating new designs and technology in compliance with market demand and takes a decidedly experiential approach of learning by doing.
The members of Winnie's organization, Solidarity Foundation, specialize in a wide variety of products, ranging from jewelry to greeting cards to educational toys. Winnie strives to identify demand for goods that larger firms are neither interested in nor able to produce. One example is handmade, didactic pregnancy dolls, which are used in schools to promote family planning, proper childcare, and breastfeeding. Whenever possible, Winnie also encourages producers with similar abilities to work collaboratively, deciding together on prices, and responding together to a greater market demand. This is tied to her meticulous attention to production cost calculation–a skill not commonly taught to small producers in Latin America. With help from a grant from the Ford Foundation, the Solidarity Foundation purchases its raw materials to sell to the producers, who usually buy with credit and repay with income from sales.
Gaining access to the market is a challenging process that the producers learn through training, shared experience, and focused market research. The women visit stores, exchange information about products and prices, study catalogues, interview potential customers, and observe state requirements. The Solidarity Foundation's members also compete for public contracts; they have already won 12. They arrive at their bids by evaluating costs and potential profits at a group assembly. The Solidarity Foundation has an advantage in the bidding process due to Winnie's uncompromising dedication to transparency and demand-oriented design. All bids include an hourly wage of 150 percent of the national minimum and openly report the organization's fee for services. The women's ability to compete in the enormous public procurement market, conventionally dominated by major companies, is a tribute to the effectiveness of Solidarity Foundation's methods and represents the potential for even greater change over the long run.
Winnie is tireless in her efforts to search for new markets. Besides successful participation in public contract bids, which represent 60 to 70 percent of total sales, the foundation operates three retail stores, participates in the International Trade Fair and several other national and international events, and compiles a high-quality mail-order catalogue. Additionally, Winnie plans a Web site that will exponentially increase the marketability of the members' products and overall sales. Sales of marketed products through the foundation have grown 100 percent during the last five years. The foundation's local market penetration has also increased significantly, thus contributing to its ultimate objective that beneficiaries reach autonomy, marketing, and selling their products directly.
Winnie has also been advocating for state governments to emphasize the importance of public business transactions with microsized and low-income enterprises. Broader state recognition will help her association gain greater national attention and bypass many of the legal issues involved in expansion. This type of relationship is unusual in Chile but in the government's best interest, as affiliates of Solidarity Foundation have proven the quality and value of their products, their organizational skills, and their long-term presence. A good rapport with state officials will help Winnie, as she and a network of other women-focused Chilean citizen sector organizations have begun to lobby for a national increase in workers' minimum wage.
Though the foundation currently benefits 500 members representing 80 groups–with 30 more groups on the waiting list–Winnie estimates that during Solidarity Foundation's 12 years, 6,000 women have been positively affected by the organization's activities. The great majority of members are women from poor urban areas surrounding Santiago, but the foundation also works with women from Combarbalá, Melipilla, Rari, Talca, Villarrica, and other small towns and villages. The model's greatest impacts have been on the small enterprises' ability to access national markets and meet demand for products of optimum quality. The second most significant impact has been the successful empowerment of the women, including widespread market recognition and improved self-esteem and organizational identity. These factors can be measured by a threefold increase in family income per producer after joining Winnie's network.
The foundation has a board of seven members and a staff of 11 for design and development, production, marketing, and international sales activities. Sixty percent of the organization's annual budget is financed through sales and the rest through fees for projects presented to different organizations in Chile and abroad. Winnie wants to spread the model nationwide, and she has received positive responses from potential partners. The Solidarity Foundation's successes in Chile are so outstanding that finding collaborators with comparable institutional capacity has become a challenge. However, Winnie is confident that she will soon be able to establish strong bases in Valparaíso, La Serena, and Concepción, thus significantly increasing the number of producers and the program's outreach.

Winnie's father was a philanthropist who founded the Poor Students' League. But though her parents advocated for the rights of underprivileged people, they enforced a social barrier that would not allow her to interact with these people. Winnie says that she has "invested most of [her] life into making that barrier disappear." Her parents died when she was 13, and although her family had been wealthy, she was unable to continue her studies; instead, she went to work at the school where she had previously been a student. However, after showing pupils a picture illustrating exploitation by rich nations in the developing world, she was soon accused of "fostering hate" and was forced to leave.
After marrying and giving birth to four children, Winnie studied Family Orientation–widely considered a career for rich women with little education. But through these studies Winnie met three wonderful teachers who helped her find direction for her will to change the world around her. She began by developing community activities in underserved neighborhoods. Meanwhile, despite her lack of a college education, she obtained a job in the Senate as a French translator and reviewer for the foreign press. Because she was employed by a democratic government, her work made her privy to suspicious activities during the military coup, suspicious activities to which she openly objected. She was fired for alleged Marxist leanings, and soon thereafter her house was destroyed.
One year after the military dictatorship began, Winnie joined the Cooperation Committee for Peace in Chile, a group that contacted political prisoners and presented about 40,000 legal appeals for their release. With the help of the Red Cross, the committee was able to visit holding camps where Winnie saw prisoners making crafts with whatever they could find: paper, wool, bone, and coins. She realized that it is "very healing to work with the hands, even in the most hopeless situation." Winnie convinced the guards to let her introduce other materials, allowing craft production among prisoners to grow to a remarkable volume. Nonetheless, she felt she had to do something more, because, she said, "it is unworthy that people produce with no destiny for their creations." She created a small marketing program with revenues going to prisoners' families. This activity proved significant both in maintaining the prisoners' integrity and sanity and proving their character to the camp guards.
Pinochet soon banned the Cooperation Committee, but activities continued under the wing of the Santiago Archbishop Solidarity Vicarage. Winnie became the head of the Workshops and Marketing Unit, through which she expanded activities for women's organizations in poor communities. These organizations supported themselves during the economic crisis of 1981-1984 by conducting sewing, knitting, and cooking workshops. As a result of these workshops, a special kind of tapestry emerged, made with fabric and wool, on which political repression was recorded through the eyes of the poor. Winnie managed to creatively, even riskily, distribute and sell millions of tapestries in more than 10 countries in Europe and North America, providing economic assistance to thousands of families and fostering the beginnings of a women's organization dedicated to fighting for a better life.
This work came to an end with the arrival of democracy in 1990. Eager to strengthen what she had already begun, Winnie gained the Archbishop's authorization to fund an independent Solidarity Foundation. In 2000 the foundation earned first prize in a regional contest promoting services for women entrepreneurs. Winnie has been invited to lecture at international congresses in Italy, France, the United States, and throughout Latin America, thereby allowing her to disseminate her Solidarity Foundation model.