The situation of women at the return of democracy was very difficult. To survive the poverty of those years, they organized communal soup kitchens, unemployment funds, health groups, community daycare centers. Machismo and domestic violence had worsened and, in response, a wave of feminist collectives emerged under the slogan Democracy in the Country and in the Home. It was 1989, and the Coordinating Body of Women's Social Organizations delivered a stark document to presidential candidate Patricio Aylwin, listing the anguish of 1,400 women: "We have little confidence in ourselves and little personality, because we do not feel heard or respected." Encouraging women's participation and helping them overcome fear was then the central motivation of Leonor Oyarzún when, in January 1990, she invited a small group of five collaborators to meet at her home. The goal was to create a foundation under the wing of the First Lady that would seek the integral development of women and rebuild the social fabric throughout the country. The name was decided quickly: Foundation for the Promotion and Development of Women, abbreviated as Prodemu.
Prodemu was born in response to a demand from the women's movement and the social movement. Many of its first workers were popular educators. Over the years, the team has changed: today young professionals with more technical training coexist with popular educators who have a much more direct reach into women's organizations.
Thirty-six years after those first meetings at Leonor Oyarzún's home, Prodemu faces the possibility of closing its doors. The 2027 Budget Bill presented by the Executive includes resources for its operation only until March 31 of next year, and for the expenses of its closure, liquidation, and dissolution. The government has justified this decision by citing the foundation's financial crisis and a duplication of functions with other public bodies. The proposal still must be debated in Congress, but it already sets an end date for the institution that was born to propel women in their development.
Pamela Farías, Paola Diez, and Marcela Sandoval led the foundation during the governments of Michelle Bachelet, Sebastián Piñera, and Gabriel Boric, respectively. Drawing on that experience, they review what Prodemu has meant in the lives of thousands of women and what could be lost with its disappearance. From left to right: Pamela Farías, Paola Diez, and Marcela Sandoval.
The Prodemu hallmark
"Leonor had a perfectly clear vision of what she wanted to instill in this new institution. It was not just about training women in trades, but in their personal development," says Ana María Correa, Prodemu's first executive director, in Autónomas, a book published on the occasion of the foundation's 30th anniversary. That vision managed to endure over time, says Paola Diez, who served between 2018 and 2022, during President Sebastián Piñera's second government. "What distinguishes Prodemu from the others (organizations that work with women) is that it has a personal development area, a lineup of courses of various kinds, but all of them begin with empowerment sessions for the development of women's autonomy in general: physical autonomy, economic autonomy, and autonomy in decision-making. These are spaces where women get to know each other, work in groups, tell their life stories, can share things about their couple relationships, their children. It is something much more integral," she says.
Pamela Farías was director between 2014 and 2018, during President Bachelet's second government. She says the workshops sought to provide tools of knowledge and empowerment. "When they say violence must be prevented, well, Prodemu was a preventive factor against violence, both by granting economic autonomy to its participants and by providing empowerment tools in relation to domestic violence. And don't even mention sexual and reproductive rights, which was also a space where women could find answers," she says.
Marcela Sandoval, who was in charge of the institution in 2022 and 2023, the first part of Gabriel Boric's government, adds that "although the content (of the training) could be oriented toward economic autonomy, toward how to start a business, how to access technological tools, how to improve their businesses, these tools were not the only thing; many of these women leave the cycle of poverty, but they also leave the cycle of violence."
Another hallmark highlighted by the directors is territorial presence. Sandoval recounts, for example, that Aymara women came down from the hills to the Putre office and used it as a meeting and training place. "Prodemu reaches places where the State is sometimes absent. Where there is coordination in certain sectors with municipalities, with regional governments, with other State institutions," she says. And she adds: "Sometimes Prodemu serves as an initial assistance mechanism, almost like an OIRS (public information and complaints office), referring women to other agencies and guiding them so they can receive social benefits."
The figures also reflect this aspect. In 2020, as detailed in the book Autónomas, Prodemu's total coverage nationwide was 67,317 women who, on average, were 48 years old. Some 33.5% of them were homemakers and 30.3% self-employed workers. Some 44.5% had not completed secondary education. It also makes a distinction by "specific populations," and there the breakdown is: 1.1% women deprived of liberty, 3.2% migrant women, 18.3% women from Indigenous peoples, 25.4% older women, and 28.3% rural women.
"It is an organization that in those years had a presence in all 56 provinces of the country. That was something that distinguished it 100%; there was no one else with that level of territorial presence. But due to resource problems, today it no longer has that presence," says Paola Diez. She is referring to the fact that, after the pandemic, provincial offices were reduced and spaces were sought in municipal facilities and those of other public agencies to reduce rent costs, while striving to maintain a presence in the country's 16 regions.
The financial crisis
Prodemu is a private-law foundation that runs programs funded mainly with State resources. Its two main sources are transfers from the National Women's and Gender Equity Service (SernamEG) and from the Institute of Agricultural and Livestock Development (Indap), the latter for the Rural Women program. These resources sustain both the activities and the teams that carry them out.
The foundation's financial crisis is one of the arguments of the current government to justify its closure. According to the management report received by Minister Judith Marín upon taking office, Prodemu had a deficit of more than 1.5 billion pesos. One third of that amount, 477 million pesos, had been carried over since 2017 due to overspending and rejected reimbursements. This deficit worsened in 2024, during Gabriel Boric's government, as former minister Antonia Orellana acknowledged, who linked that deterioration to the tightening by the Comptroller General's Office of the funding rules for all foundations, after the Convenios case. One of the expenses that began to be objected to was the payment of labor benefits agreed in collective bargaining over the years: obligations that Prodemu could not fail to meet.
The current minister has pointed out that Prodemu reached this situation in 2022, when the foundation ceased to be linked to the Sociocultural Coordination of the Presidency. For Marcela Sandoval, who was in charge during that period, that explanation confuses two different changes: the institution's dependency and its source of resources. The funding continued to come from SernamEG and Indap, as it had before, she explains. She also points out that the Ministry of Women appealed to the Comptroller's ruling and that at the beginning of this year, the Comptroller's Office rectified its pronouncement, specifying that the new criterion should apply to transfer agreements signed after April 2, 2026, without affecting situations prior to that date.
But when it comes to foundations of this kind, and with the aim of keeping them because of their importance to women, Sandoval points out that the goal always was, and should be, to seek alliances with private parties, or different initiatives that would allow generating new resources through other channels. That is what she did during her tenure, as did Paola Diez, who says that during her management they also sought donations and conducted studies for other institutions. With that own-source income, they covered expenses they could not finance with public resources.
Can Prodemu be replaced?
For Paola Diez, the discussion about Prodemu's continuity predates this crisis. "The closure of the foundation has been on the table for several governments. This is not new," she says. Her explanation points to a historic shift in public management. Prodemu was born at a specific moment for the country and the State, when there was nothing, but as the years went by, other institutions emerged, such as Fosis, Sercotec, Indap, etc., which also began working with women and offering training and entrepreneurship tools, and therefore those social programs began to overlap. For that reason, she believes Prodemu has already fulfilled its role. Although she acknowledges that "women will miss that direct presence that Prodemu had in the regions and provinces."
Marcela Sandoval, on the other hand, says that the duplication the government also speaks of is not such. "SernamEG has a public offering that is much more specific in the issues it addresses; for example, in cases of violence it provides legal and psychological assistance, but Prodemu reaches a much earlier stage," she says. She adds that there are evaluations of the public offering's programs to verify that there is no such duplication, either in objectives or in beneficiaries. "Sometimes there are beneficiaries who have indeed accessed other programs from SernamEG, Sence, and Prodemu. But that is because they are at different stages of training and because the State distributes its training offerings also according to different levels, according to the needs of that target population." And she goes further: "I find that reflection quite shallow, because the beneficiaries of a social program will not necessarily receive the same type of care from another institution that was not born for the same purposes, nor has the methodologies, nor the workers trained for it. To adapt that public offering, they will need resources."
Pamela Farías is also critical of that alleged duplication and believes it would be difficult for another institution to replicate Prodemu's work. "The support from Indap —for example— besides being economic, is very technical, very targeted support," she says. And she goes further: "Honestly, I don't believe the government (...) when it says there will continue to be resources to foster women's economic autonomy through other State agencies; I think it's a sweetener so people won't complain, but these agencies have no capacity whatsoever to take on a program like Prodemu."
In addition, Sandoval adds, adapting that public offering would also require resources: professional, financial, because some institutions do not have the capacity, do not have that office, do not have the territorial deployment that Prodemu has had.
Farías is especially critical of the way it was done, "overnight, without any process." If the solution was a process of transferring Prodemu's functions to the National Women's Service, it was important to carry out a planned closure that would not leave women without this service, nor so many other women without jobs.
The concern about what is to come also leads Sandoval to remember the women she met during her tenure. "It is a very sad signal. It affects me because I traveled the country and had the chance to meet many women's groups connected with Prodemu: peasant women, artisans, Indigenous women, from different places, from very remote areas. They all agreed on one thing: Prodemu had helped them have a better life."
In those encounters, she observed work that spanned different governments and that often went beyond the duties and responsibilities of the staff. Over time, that accompaniment had made it possible to build relationships of trust, especially in places where accessing information, tools, and organizations was more difficult. "The networks of rural women, the networks of Indigenous women and of entrepreneurs that have formed around Prodemu are a community."
For Farías, the decision also expresses the place those women occupy among the government's priorities. "Symbolically, it is also hard to see that this more conservative outlook comes at the expense of the most vulnerable women, because ultimately Prodemu's participants are poor women. Peasant women, women from popular sectors, women with great vulnerability."
The support they received, she recalls, could begin with a course or with funds for a small business, but its effects also extended to the confidence they had in themselves. "It is ultimately a very individualistic vision of society because, sure, fend for yourself, after all, what matters here is growth — but it truly is sad and fills one with a sense of powerlessness."