Phe Soknav

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Phe Soknav by CREDIT MFI -- World Relief in Cambodia. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 12 - 18 months, CREDIT MFI -- World Relief will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Ten minutes off the main road down a rutted red dirt lane in the countryside of Kampong Cham, Phe Soknav and her family live in a one-room thatched house on stilts. In addition to raising her small son and daughter, she and her husband also support her mother. Three times a week she leaves home at 4am to make the three-hour journey to the Vietnamese border on a motorbike with a small trailer attached. The fruit and produce grown in Vietnam is significantly less expensive than that grown in Cambodia. She takes advantage of this price difference by transporting the goods back to her village to sell. Most of the produce, including garlic, onions and fresh fruit, is sold to a wholesaler, but she does pickle the lemons to sell retail at the market herself. These pickled lemons are featured next to her in the photograph.

Before borrowing capital, Phe Soknav only sold lemons and had to pay a great deal in transportation costs to rent a motorbike for the journey. She sought out a loan from CREDIT MFI when she decided to expand her business. Her first loan was very small as her home was not valuable enough to act as collateral. But she has built her credit worthiness by paying back all three previous loans on time at an interest rate of 2.5% per month, allowing her to borrow this $1200 Kiva loan, her largest loan yet. She used one of the loans to purchase the motorbike and trailer, and the other loans to expand her inventory.

Her Kiva loan financed the expansion of her inventory of fruit, allowing her to completely fill the trailer each trip and further diversifying her products to buffer her business from market price fluctuations. Previous to her loans, she earned $5 per day in income. After investing four loans in the expansion of her business, she now makes up to $20 per day in income. In the future, she plans to take out a fifth loan in order to purchase an additional variety of products and take advantage of bulk reductions in price by buying in larger quantities from the Vietnamese supplier. She also plans to purchase a van to transport the additional goods.

Her increased income along with her husband’s earnings of $3 per day as a horse cart driver pays for her family’s food and her children’s school expenses. Though the schools are ostensibly free for all children in Cambodia, in reality there are fees to cover books, food, uniforms, and the “extra” lessons needed to pass exams. These fees can average up to $2 per day per student at the middle and high school level. Because of their increased income, they are able to improve their family’s standard of living, save money for the future, and make plans to build a better house one day with several rooms and a tin roof. She also reinvests her income into her business so that the growth will continue in the future.

- Jordyan Edmiston, Kiva Fellow, Cambodia