Laura Lopez | Segovia (EFE).- Tam, Raquel and Belén produce “La Repera” from Sacramenia (Segovia), a village “pógcar” (podcast) with which they empower the growing number of rural women who, like them, dare to undertake their own businesses from what they consider to be wrongly called “Empty Spain”.
Tam Alvalaz, 39, belongs to “that generation that was sold that, to be someone in life, you had to run out of town” but in 2020, after his company went “down the drain”, he What the body asked of him was to “get out of Madrid” and return to his Sacramenia, where some 250 people live.
There were Raquel Arranz, 52, consolidated as “the master cheese maker of Sacramenia”, and Belén Martínez, 49, who after having worked “in everything there has been and will have”, had just launched to open a business selling of portions of lamb trotters, “La Manitas de Sacramenia”.
“What happened to us is that the famous pandemic arrives and we have to start selling online and we didn’t really know how. I had been working with my cheese factory for twenty years and Belén was just starting, but we had the same problems”, Raquel recounts in an interview with Agencia EFE.
Tam tried to help them and detected that this need extended to many other enterprising rural women who, like them, had suddenly been forced to jump on the digitalization bandwagon and could not find tools, not even in the training courses that were within their reach. .
“I used to say ‘But are they giving this course in Spanish?’”, says Raquel, who now laughs when she remembers it but acknowledges that she had a terrible time at the time.
“She said ‘I don’t understand anything’ and on top of that, since I didn’t understand anything, I felt terrible because I felt stupid, ‘I don’t know how to do anything, after so many years I’m going to have to close, I’m not going to be able to get this forward…’”, the artisan remembers thinking at that moment.
From craft fairs to social networks
To overcome this digital gap, do “therapy”, laugh, cry and never feel alone in the face of so many changes, this “pógcar” was born, which has stuck with that name because at first none of them knew how to pronounce the name of the format correctly. .
In each chapter, Tam, Raquel and Belén share their fears and concerns about their businesses and, through interviews with experts from the digital world, whom they call “Las Maestras”, they learn “in plain language” what they need to know. to evolve.
Together they discover what a “content strategist” or a “community manager” really does in a company, how the famous algorithm works in social networks, who can access the Digital Kit program of European funds, how a brand image is built or how Fight impostor syndrome.
Beyond the podcast, «La Repera» is a community that has close to a hundred associated rural entrepreneurs (the «titis») and 300 subscriptions to its “newsletter” (“la gacetilla”) and which includes other projects, such as the creation of a virtual market, in which they are now working.
Growth of rural entrepreneurs
The perception that these three entrepreneurs have is that there are more and more women who “are daring to be daring” to open their own business, as Belén says, and they use their own town as an example, where there are twenty and most are led by women.
According to the latest report GIRA Mujeres Coca Cola, with data from 2021 and 2022, 8.1 percent of rural women in Spain have a consolidated entrepreneurial project, a figure that is almost three points higher than the percentage in urban environments.
The president of the Federation of Rural Women’s Associations (FADEMUR), Teresa López, agrees that there has been a “very progressive” growth of rural women who begin to undertake in the last five or six years, as she explained in statements to EFE .
«The women who opt to stay in the territory are clear that they do so if they have their own income and it is difficult to find work for someone else, so in most cases they choose to undertake business because they detect business opportunities in their area and treat them accordingly. take advantage,” he said.
More than 350 enterprises participate in the FADEMUR platform of entrepreneurs “Ruraltivity”: 40 percent are women under 40 years of age and almost 70 percent are in towns with fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, data that Teresa López sees as something “very hopeful”.
Weaving the future of the peoples
For them, the “fundamental” role that women entrepreneurs have to fight against depopulation in rural areas or, as Belén says, “so that this does not die” is more than demonstrated.
“It is very important to generate and create a business fabric and we are not talking about an industrial estate full of companies and buildings. It is that just by generating a job in a town that has 300 inhabitants… oh my, is that another family could live there”, analyzes the businesswoman.
Raquel rejects the term “Empty Spain” as “depressing”, she believes that it is still “the great unknown” although much is said about it and she would like more people to approach her because, she assures, “it is worth it”: “99.9 percent of those of us who live in rural Spain have decided to live in rural Spain, no one has imposed it on us,” he recalls.EFE