Nicaragua

Helping Women Build Better Businesses in Latin America

The Impulsa Tu Empresa (“Boost Your Business”) program is a business accelerator program, which aims to help 850 small and growing businesses across Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Burkina Faso. With support from the Argidius Foundation, the Multilateral Investment Fund, the Walmart Foundation, the Citi Foundation and the PIMCO…

A New Boost for Entrepreneurs in Central America and Africa

In 2010, university student Julio Baltodano surveyed the local apparel industry in Managua, Nicaragua, and devised a clever business idea. Together with his friend Verónica Bucardo, Julio envisioned IKO Imagen as a leather and textile manufacturer that would specialize in handbags and brand merchandising, or placing company logos on t-shirts…

Farmer Cooperative Promotes Education, Nutrition and Prosperity

On a farm in the northern Nicaraguan town of Chagüite Grande, Melvin Estrada tends to his cabbage crop. He and his hired workers pick the plants, inspect them for quality and load them into a truck bound for a local collection center – and eventually a major supermarket. Melvin used…

A New Methodology for Teaching Finance

In Nicaragua, Iveth Juárez, a small business owner who processes and sells cereal to the local market, had attended seminars, workshops, courses and training sessions on accounting and finance. But at the end of each session, she always felt the same sense of confusion.

Cocoa Offers New Hope for Nicaraguan Farmers

The Jorge Salazar Cooperative, located in the northern municipality of El Tuma-La Dalia, is a collective of 46 farmers – mostly veterans of Nicaragua’s civil war in the 1980s, which devastated the country’s economy. In an effort to incorporate ex-guerillas back into civilian society, TechnoServe – with the support of…

Helping Farmers Cash in on Specialty Coffee

Since trading their guns for plows at the end of the Nicaraguan civil war, Modesto Reyes and his fellow coffee farmers have transformed the community of Pueblo Nuevo, with better health services and new education facilities for its children and stable livelihoods for hundreds of men and women. Reyes…