One of three generations in her family to receive a microfinancing loan, Yanet makes beaded earrings on the bus from her village to Oaxaca, where she is an accounting student at the university

Sometimes it takes a global village to help the one just down the road.

For Fundación En Vía of Oaxaca, Mexico, that means not only reaching out to touch the lives of a nearby community through microfinancing loans and free English classes, but sharing the experience with people from all over the world who would rather be travelers than tourists. The nonprofit organization runs tours twice a week from the capital city to the village of Teotitlán del Valle about 30km away, putting 100% of tour fees into a microfinancing loan pot for local women.

Everyone comes out richer: the women with small-business seed money they could never secure on their own, and the travelers who would never have the opportunity to make such intimate contact with the local culture. Which is, after all, the goal of local travel.

“Local travel involves being very conscious of getting local products and services from the source in any country or village,” says En Vía Executive Director Carlos Hernandez Topete. “It means trying to get more money to the local people of the area, and respecting the environment, not just the ecological one but the social environment: being respectful of customs and how things are done.”

Hernandez Topete, also co-director of the Instituto Cultural de Oaxaca (ICO) language school wherethe tours are based, launched the non-profit organization’s first tour in June of 2008. In the remaining months of that first year, 12 women received loans. In 2010, 100 women wereable to fund their business dreams with En Vía seed money.

Continue reading this article on the Fundación En Vía website