Q&A with Catalina Garcia
Catalina Garcia, Director of Communications and Sustainable Development for SABMiller Latin America, has spearheaded the “4e, Path to Progress” program, a $23 million commitment to help small retailers enhance their business and interpersonal skills, as well as their leadership potential in order to make their business grow and help them to improve their business environment.
What inspired you?
What inspired us was the opportunity to share with different actors of society. [...] Our purpose with our program we are running with SAB Miller in Latin America and now in Africa is to transform and change the lives of many families, thousands of families in the region, that live in poor conditions.
How do you identify or define success?
What we want to achieve through the 4e program is to improve the skills of these small retailers — the business skills, life skills, their leadership skills — so they can become agents of change in their communities. We are, as a whole, empowering communities so they can contribute to the social and economic change of these huge populations in the developing countries of Latin America and Africa.
What are the biggest obstacles you've faced?
First, the limited business and life skills that these small retailers have. The lack of access to finance and technology. Their informality. They are learning to become formal businesses with a license to operate. And the obstacles, more than that, is that these programs, training programs, are costly, so we need many, many actors to be part of this so we can all join efforts and scale the program in a more productive and effective way, and introduce technology and finance.
What did you learn from the Symposium?
The main learning of this symposium is that we have a lot of commonalities and the same objectives of contributing to social and economic development in the different countries around the world and this cannot be done alone. We need the governments, we need the private sector, the NGOs, academia, we need the media to be part of this process, and the multilateral organizations with their expertise, with their technical assistance, so we can build together the best social and economic value offer or package to all those people in need.