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Pablo Obregón and Aura Maquillón receive the award in Cartagena.
Mario Santo Domingo Foundation
Helping Others Help Themselves
By Peter Bate
The Mario Santo Domingo Foundation, a non-profit institution founded by one of Colombia's richest men, believes in teaching people how to fish—and not just in a figurative way. One of its signature programs has helped fishing co-operatives on the Caribbean coast improve their enterprises by providing them micro-credit and business development services.
In the island of Baru the foundation assisted the local co-op in establishing a microcredit program that allows borrowers to pay off their loans with fish. The financing allowed the fishermen to lower the costs of fixing their outboard motors and buying nets. The co-op's women, who clean, process and sell the catch, received training and technical assistance in marketing and administration, skills they needed to reach more clients, manage their business more effectively and fatten the bottom line.
Many of the foundation's programs take place in and around the city of Barranquilla, where Mario Santo Domingo first made his brewing fortune. During its first three decades the foundation's main areas of interest were education, culture and philanthropy. But in 1989 it shifted its focus to improving the living standards of the poor, particularly through activities based on beneficiaries' own efforts, such as microenterprise. In the words of its president, Pablo Obregón Santo Domingo, the foundation serves Colombians who "need only a little help to succeed and become examples for their families, their communities and their country."
Over the years, more than 300 thousand people have received training in business administration, organization and marketing as well as other forms of technical assistance and technology transfers thanks to the foundation, which last year won the IDB Award for Excellence in Business Development Services.
Besides financial resources and training, the foundation offers opportunities to participate in missions to attend trade fairs abroad and learn how small businesses acquire and employ new technologies. It also provides access to financing for home improvements and construction, health plans, sports and recreation.
The foundation runs La Comercializadora, a trading company that buys and sells products from microenterprises and small businesses in Colombia's coastal region that make handicrafts, home decoration items, apparel and home-style food products. The company works with its suppliers to improve and maintain the quality of their goods and provides them working capital as well as expertise to penetrate high-value markets at home and abroad. While its shareholders include regional chambers of commerce and foundations with strong business ties, La Comercializadora also resorts to Colombian star power to open doors. It teamed up Barranquilla-born actress Sofia Vergara with a co-op of seamstresses to manufacture her line of clothing. Under the deal, the celebrity not only lends her name to the brand but must also deploy her charms to access major retailers in Latin America and the United States.
The foundation is also concerned with the wrenching impact of Colombia's violent and protracted armed conflict. Since the year 2000 it has been reaching out to one of Colombia's most vulnerable groups, the desplazados, people who have fled their homes in the countryside to escape the violent and protracted conflict between the armed forces, guerrillas and paramilitary groups. In the Nelson Mandela neighborhood of Cartagena, the foundation has helped desplazados set up bakeries and handicraft, metal and textile workshops.
ACCION International President and CEO Maria Otero said her organization is proud to have worked with Mario Santo Domingo Foundation since 1989 to help fight poverty in Colombia through microfinance and basic business training for entrepreneurs. "The Foundation has helped tens of thousands of Colombia's self-employed poor, especially women and their families, by providing business and housing loans," said Otero. "We are privileged to partner with such an exceptional organization and congratulate them on their award."
