Mexican Consulate helps Latina women become entrepreneurs

The Consular Entrepreneurship Program for Mexican Women Abroad is a program developed by the Mexican Consulate of Phoenix to help women of Mexican origin develop businesses.

The six-month training program helps women learn how to start and run businesses with the aim of creating jobs and boosting the economy. To hear more about the program, we were joined by Jorge Mendoza Yescas, the Consul General of Mexico in Phoenix.

Yescas said the consulate was invited to learn more about a platform called DreamBuilder from Thunderbird School of Global Management, which gave them the idea to start a similar program.

“We decided to use it in order to invite women to participate with this platform. Then we began adding elements to this program, and then this is how it was born,” Yescas said. “We took advantage of the position that the consulate has in the community in the sense that we have access to several business leaders, (and) political leaders. And then together, we created a whole program that not only trains women to make a business plan which was the original purpose for DreamBuilder.”

Yescas said another aspect of the program was helping participants learn how to market and invest in a business. Yescas said they took the DreamBuilder platform and added important elements to build the entrepreneurship program.

“We considered that also we needed to have these women in contact with real business leaders. That’s why we created different stages in the program,” Yescas said. “First they finish the DreamBuilder, then they go to a stage where in which they have contact with business leaders that become their mentors. Those mentors are very well known business leaders in our community.”

Recently, 28 women graduated from the program, making a total of 120 graduates in Phoenix. Nationally approximately 1,000 women have graduated. Yescas said the women learn to network and learn about the resources that are available to them.

“It’s about the possibility they have to make their dreams a reality, in the sense that all these women have this idea, this intention, to create something to advance in terms of income… but they don’t know how,” Yescas said.