The school said no, so she wrote to the organisers

Out of more than 80 projects at the 2024 Young Leaders Summit, organised by América Solidaria, Natalia Espinoza Cerrón's team was recognised among the seven with the greatest potential. Getting there took a no. She had asked her school to assign the team a mentor, but the school refused. "Instead of accepting that as the end of the story, I wrote directly to the organizers explaining our situation," she says. The organisers said yes, she says, as long as an adult was willing to accompany the team. Her dad became that adult.

She and a classmate missed three days of school to attend. "Those three days changed the way I think," she says. Later on, her teammate decided not to continue.

“Some of the experiences that have shaped me most began when I truly didn't know what I was doing, but I was willing to act and learn. And as I built my projects, I realized I was also building myself.”

Natalia Espinoza Cerrón

"So I kept going on my own," she says.

Sueños de Hogar is a social venture for domestic workers, and its first MVP is already live: a landing page to measure interest in the proposal. It reached the final of the Diamond Challenge, in the top 4% of 1,845 teams worldwide, and was nominated for the Capital One Pathways to Prosperity Prize, which recognises solutions for economic prosperity. Along the way, she has spoken with social entrepreneurs, financial inclusion specialists and organisations that work directly with domestic workers. "Those conversations challenged many of my initial assumptions. I discovered how much I didn't know, and that was okay," she says.

She first started thinking about Sueños de Hogar in 10th grade. The question behind it began with someone who has been part of her family for over 13 years. "Watching a domestic worker dedicate most of her life to caring for other families' homes, yet still unable to improve her own, led me to a question I couldn't ignore: why?" she says.

Since then, she has come to understand that the problem is structural: labour informality, limited access to education and distrust of the financial system all play a part, among other factors. She has presented the initiative to the coordinator of the ILO's Abriendo Puertas programme in Peru, who shared her proposal with domestic workers' unions and encouraged her to contact them directly. She has also reached out to other organisations that work closely with domestic workers. Building those connections has taken longer than expected, because each conversation revealed new sides of the problem that she needed to understand before moving forward. In the coming months, she will hold small in-person financial education workshops with groups of domestic workers, to get to know them closely and measure the impact of the proposal. Her priority is clear, she says: "Before launching the pilot program, I want to listen directly to domestic workers and make sure that what I build responds to their real needs."

Through Sueños de Hogar, she earned a merit scholarship to the Venture and Tech Summer Program and was recently admitted to the High School Startup Launchpad at Berkeley Haas, UC Berkeley. She was also invited to moderate the panel "Youth Leadership that Transcends" at CADE Escolar 2026 on 10 October, the student forum of IPAE Acción Empresarial, one of Peru's leading business organisations, before more than 500 students from public and private schools across the country.