By Katie Hunt
BBC NEWS

A teacher by training, Lynne Randolph Patterson never expected to find herself at the helm of a multi-national financial services company. Twenty years ago, she was volunteering at a young mothers club in La Paz, Bolivia, where her husband had been posted for work. She was there to deliver empowerment lessons but the women, who attended twice a week in exchange for donated food, all told her one thing: "We need to earn money." Along with her colleague, Carmen Velasco, a psychologist, they began to offer the women business training and tried to find them credit. Inspired by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, whose founder Muhammad Yunus pioneered microfinance, they began to offer small loans of around $50.

The women formed groups to guarantee each other's loans, and made simple business plans showing how they would invest and repay their first loans. "Not being very financial, we made lots of mistakes in the beginning," she says.

But they persevered, and Pro Mujer (Pro Woman in Spanish) as their organisation is now called, now provides 222,000 women with loans, business training and healthcare in five Latin American countries.

For the entire story