Santiago Garcia Heredia

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Santiago Garcia Heredia by Fundación Agrocapital in Bolivia. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 24 months, Fundación Agrocapital will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Santiago is a cheerful, upbeat gentleman who seems ten years younger than he really is. He welcomes me into his home on the outskirts of the city of Santa Cruz early one Tuesday morning, where he and his wife also run their neighborhood store and call center.

Things have been going very well, Santiago tells me: “I’ve known how to invest [my loans].” This is his third loan with AgroCapital: he used his first loan to buy a freezer, his second to set up the call center, and his most recent Kiva loan to buy more merchandise to stock his store to prepare for the holiday season rush. “It helped me out a lot, excellent,” he says, adding that it allowed him to do everything he had hoped to in relation to his store. He appreciates the service provided to him by AgroCapital, especially the speed with which they were able to disburse his loan (usually within three days). He had previously taken out another loan with a different Bolivian microfinance institution, but they charged high interest rates, and he had trouble repaying the loan.

Aside from running the store/call center, Santiago works as a gardener part-time in a nearby neighborhood of new homes, where individuals hire him to install flowerbeds or mow their lawns. His store faces an athletic field, so he also works selling food at Sunday soccer tournaments. He used to bake bread to sell at his store, he tells me, but the roof of his oven caved in recently as a consequence of the strong winds that regularly hit Santa Cruz. He chuckles that he’ll have to see if AgroCapital will give him a little more money to fix the oven. Santiago has a delightfully upbeat attitude about life—despite working at least three different jobs six or seven days per week, he has a decidedly relaxed manner. He tells me, “As long as there’s strength and money to work, anything can be done.”