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Isabella Jara; Pilar Marambio; Michelle Boisier; Loreto Seguel and Julie McPherson

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely business, confesses Isabella Jaras, co-founder of Nutra Bien, a Chilean company that produces muffins, cookies and other snacks. And, for women, seeking to juggle work and family, it can be doubly tough.

That challenge - and the prosperity they can contribute to their families and country’s economic development - was the reason for a conference, organized in Washington D.C. last October by the U.S. Department of State. By bringing together women entrepreneurs from around the Americas, it sought to put them in touch not only with potential clients or backers, but also with each other.

The conference formed part of the Pathways to Prosperity initiative launched in September 2008 when leaders of Latin American countries met in New York with then-President George W. Bush to develop a program to maximize the value of their trade agreements with the United States. Initially, the plan was to focus on issues such as trade-capacity building; women’s entrepreneurship was added later and you can tell that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is “totally committed”, says Julie McPherson, an American who with a Chilean partner founded Tiaxa, a Santiago-based company that bills data services for mobile telephone companies.

“At multilaterals in Washington D.C., there’s sometimes a lot of fluffy stuff going on,” she says, “but this conference was focused and well directed.”

It helps that Pathways to Prosperity is “a very bottom-up initiative,” she adds. “It’s envisaged as a partnership, not as the U.S. telling Latin America what it’s going to do about women’s entrepreneurship.”

Entitled ACCESS, the conference addressed common problems for entrepreneurs including access to markets, technology, training and, of course, finance. Much of that was ground that the five Chile-based entrepreneurs who were invited had already covered.

Chile is quite advanced in many areas compared to other Latin American countries, says Pilar Marambio, a partner in Maraseed, a business founded by her father and brother that multiplies seeds for export. “We tried not to feel that way but it’s true.”

“More than new tools, we came away with access to a new network of contacts,” says Michelle Boisier, the founder of Araucanía Yarns, a company that dyes and exports knitting wool. But the conference also helped her to understand how to refocus her existing business and visualize the new business she wants to create in the future, she adds.

But each of the five entrepreneurs also came away with something more specific - a mentor for a year, financed by Pathways to Prosperity.

Marambio’s mentor is an American businesswoman who gave up a career as an accountant to form a company with her husband to provide construction project management services. “Like me, she works in a very masculine area and, as we prepare for a third leap in the development of our business, I think she’ll be able to help me as a person,” says Marambio.

Isabella Jaras is, on the other hand, looking for something more concrete. After going into partnership with a large confectionery manufacturer last year, her company needs to expand production to take advantage of its partner’s distribution network, and that means innovation and technology.

Her mentor is a Mexican woman who has lived for 30 years in California where she founded Lulu’s Dessert, a company that introduced the concept of readymade jellies and survived even though many of its products were imitated by larger competitors. “In many ways, we’re on a similar level but I think she can help me with product innovation,” says Jaras.

But, as well as access to markets, finance and so on, women entrepreneurs, especially those just starting out, need access to another scarce product - role models. And there, the five local entrepreneurs realized they could help.

“Sometimes you don’t realize what you’ve built and when you go to an event of this type, you see what you’ve achieved,” says Loreto Seguel who, after selling Mundo Marino, a frozen food company, is now starting a new company, La Bocatta, to make gourmet frozen desserts. “Just as there are people we admire, there are others for whom we’re one step ahead and can provide an opportunity, whether a piece of advice or, maybe, a contact,” says Seguel.

“We’re often very much engrossed in our own businesses but I agree with Loreto,” says Jaras, “and I came away from the conference thinking about what we have to do in Chile.”

That’s especially the case when not all women have the same access to opportunities, insists Marambio. “We five have had so many opportunities, culturally, socially and educationally, that aren’t open to everyone.”

All five women have received assistance from Endeavor, a U.S.-based non-profit organization that promotes entrepreneurship. “That means we already had the concept of giving back, but what we want to do now is more than that - we want to have a positive impact on at least one other woman entrepreneur,” says McPherson.

To that end, they are in the process of founding a new organization - Impakta -precisely to help women entrepreneurs at an earlier stage of their career. The aim, says McPherson, is to take a maximum of two to three cases in 2010.

It won’t be easy to juggle that with the demands of their own businesses and families, she admits. But help is at hand.

Her own mentor, an experienced executive coach, will be visiting at the end of February and has agreed to help them draw up a working plan for Impakta with long-term goals. “Pathways will be paying for her visit and that sort of neatly closes the loop,” says McPherson.

Or, perhaps, opens it to spread the work that began in Washington even further.

Ruth Bradley is the Santiago correspondent of The Economist.