Entrepreneurship Education and Microfinancing: The Least We Can Do

Featured image: Students at a Kids Alive school in Dominican Republic (Source: Kids Alive DR)

By Mateo Noguera Montoya

The Trump administration has hacked off much more than the lofty, benevolent rhetoric that once decorated US foreign aid. The United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, aimed to “promote and demonstrate democratic values abroad, and advance a free, peaceful, and prosperous world.” It was not a charity; it helped build the international coalition that the US counted on whenever economic or military conflict arose. Today, the Good Neighbor approach is dead and the image of Uncle Sam reaching out a humanitarian hand to Latin America has eroded completely. Cuts to the State Department, USAID, and promising to take Greenland have all sent a clear “America first” message to the world.

In August of 2024, the White House released a report boasting its deep-rooted relationship with the Dominican Republic. According to the report, the US has educated 31,000 emerging Dominican leaders through programs like the Fulbright, which provides funds for graduate students and young professionals from abroad to study in the US. The report further celebrated US-DR relations cultivated by the Peace Corps, USAID, and free trade agreements, all of which are suffering the same fate as Fulbright in the name of government efficiency.

The United States’ withdrawal from the world will leave our allies scrambling, damaging America’s image for the foreseeable future, but let’s pivot away from the federal government and zoom into an arena where individuals like you and I can have a more concrete impact. Kids Alive is an international nonprofit with schools in Kenya, Guatemala, Haiti, Lebanon, Peru, Zambia, and the Dominican Republic. In the DR, Kids Alive has seven schools and three residential facilities serving children from violent, neglectful homes in extreme poverty. Kids Alive has been established in the Dominican Republic for over 35 years and is achieving the work that the US government was once proud to champion: educating the world’s most vulnerable populations.

I have had the privilege of working with Kids Alive since my sophomore year of high school because my alma mater, Wheaton Academy, sponsors 23 Kids Alive students. As a part of the Business and Innovations Club, I volunteered at our student-run food truck, The Shack, selling cinnamon rolls for Kids Alive and I was part of a team that would organize football tailgates, talent shows, and assemblies as fundraisers. Wheaton Academy has been partnering with Kids Alive since 2012 when Victor and Leslie Trautwein, the Kids Alive DR Co-Country Directors, sent two of their kids there. From then, the administration decided to start sending teams of students to volunteer in the Dominican Republic.

Kids Alive isn’t your typical day school. It vastly outperforms local schools academically, with a graduation rate of 80%, according to the Trautweins, compared to the national average of 18%, an especially impressive statistic considering their students’ backgrounds. Kids Alive DR also provides holistic care, providing medical services, nutrition, housing, and even scholarships to local colleges and vocational schools. This summer, a team of interns and I are helping them develop an entrepreneurship training course for graduates looking to start businesses.

The entrepreneurship team includes two friends of mine from high school, Jack and Ian — students at UVA and Stanford, respectively, and who have been to the DR. Jack created the “Life & Job Skills Program,” which is dedicated to teaching budgeting, spending, and saving habits to Kids Alive high school students and teachers. The goal of this summer’s curriculum expansion is to include some basic building blocks of business: questions like, What is profit? How do I identify a good or service that would satisfy unfulfilled market demand? How do I effectively invest capital?

NGOs like Kids Alive offer a means to make use of the knowledge that people in these communities already possess. In the context of entrepreneurship, someone might know what good or service their community is missing, but lack the capital and educational capabilities to start providing that good or service. In its early stages, our entrepreneurship program will focus on piloting a curriculum equipping students with tools like Excel and teaching basic economic concepts like supply and demand. To understand more about the need for this type of program, I interviewed Victor Trautwein about the potential for entrepreneurship in the DR.

Students celebrating a donation of books at a Kids Alive school (Photo: Kids Alive)

Vic first got involved with Kids Alive at 36 after a career in the US natural resources industry. After graduating from Dartmouth, Vic worked as — you guessed it —a consultant, then going on to attend Stanford Business school. He launched his career with the logging giant Weyerhaeuser where he stayed for 10 years, but ultimately felt called upon to use his talent for service. Vic and his wife Leslie, a pediatrician, then decided to move to the DR and apply their skills as administrators for Kids Alive Vic and Leslie have been with Kids Alive for 23 years and oversee all DR operations including school management, students health services like nutrition and medical care, and fundraising.

“We love when our students become teachers, doctors, or lawyers, but many don’t desire professional careers and entrepreneurship is a way they can earn money with what’s available to them,” Vic said.

The DR has had an influx of, according to the UN Refugee Agency, between six hundred fifty thousand and one million Haitian immigrants and many lack the documentation to work in the formal sector. Most Kids Alive graduates have to support their families immediately after graduating, so higher education is not an option. Meanwhile, small businesses have had a tailwind since the Dominican economy is growing with money from tourism and agriculture, boosting businesses that enjoy de facto leeway from regulations. A food stand, portable car wash, or a bodega out of your house are all common businesses that can provide income to graduates under these circumstances.

“We’ve seen youth start a lawn mowing business and thrive, but they’re hustling to do it…they know they can’t not have new clients so they find a way. We’ve also seen people try to open a storefront; they buy inventory, sell it at a loss, and fall into debt,” said Vic.

Educational tools can make the difference between making a profit and falling into debt. There are many determined students with the wit to run a successful business; it’s a matter of finding and enabling them with a financial education and, eventually, finance.

In 2006, Muhammad Yanus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with microloans and USAID has funded microenterprises across the world. Despite USAID’s efforts to reduce poverty through microloans, the effectiveness of these programs is dubious at best. In 2021, after USAID planned to spend 1.14 billion dollars on microloans, the Government Accountability Office ran a review on their effectiveness finding underwhelming results. It notes, “Of the nine impact evaluations…[only] two reported statistically significant short-term effects at the overall project level [and none long-term].”

Education should take the front seat since the goal is to empower people to lift themselves out of poverty. Eventually, however, an educated, ambitious entrepreneur needs capital. The amount of credit available in the United States has created a fertile ground for entrepreneurship. This has been true since the United States’ inception. To jumpstart early American entrepreneurial success, “Benjamin Franklin created and funded small enterprise microcredit programmes in Philadelphia and Boston.” What we aim to do is create a similarly friendly environment that Americans enjoy in the DR to prevent the waste of human capital where potential abounds but education and financing are scarce. Of course, not everyone wants the life of an entrepreneur — but for those that do, Kids Alive offers tools for success.

History has taught Latin America that there’s danger when the US shows up saying, “We’re here to help!” Americans often come with pride, thinking that we’re right and the world is wrong. Furthermore, people in under-resourced communities may not have formal training in business but they have real world experience that is much more valuable than the Econ 115 equations I’ve memorized (and forgotten). That past does not mean we should become cynics abandoning the world and isolating ourselves in the process. Americans should fight for the most optimistic view of what this country stands for, especially when our own government is acting against these ideals. It’s our responsibility to reel Washington back in when they go against what this country is. For better or worse, we bear significant responsibility for the current state of the world. Whether we knew (or cared), our occupations and continued economic presence in the DR put it where it is now. We cannot now abandon the world we shaped.


Mateo Noguera Montoya is a freshman in the class of 2028. He can be reached at mateo.nogueramontoya@yale.edu.