Domitila Julca

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Domitila Julca by EDAPROSPO in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 6 months, EDAPROSPO will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Domitila Julca is an extremely hardworking entrepreneur working in Los Olivos, Peru, a suburb of Lima. Her everyday routine is truly remarkable. She wakes up everyday at 2am to drive to downtown Lima. There she buys a truckload of potatoes (costing 15000 to 18000 soles). She sells half to other wholesale buyers in the downtown market at La Victoria. Then she takes the other half to the market pictured above in Los Olivos to sell on her streetside stall. In order to sell IN the market, you have to buy the retail space. Ms. Julca, recognizing that vegetable buyers congregate in the free roadside section outside of the market and that potatoes do not have as high a profit margin as other products, bought two stalls inside the market and rents them out to clothing sellers while she maintains her stall on the street. She continues to sell her various types of potatoes until noon at which point she sells whatever she has left to a group of 18 or so restaurant and small bodega owners who pick them up. Then at 3pm she gets her onion shipment in and sells those until nightfall. She goes home at 9pm and repeats her routine at 2am the next morning. She does this seven days a week.

Ms. Julca has five children, four of whom are in university. Two sons have scholarships and she pays for the university studies of the other two. She is a nutritionist by profession and used to work in a university. Her next business venture is to buy land in Huaraz (a mountain town 8 hours north of Lima) where she will cultivate maca. Maca is a tuber that can be made into a drink (I tried it at another stand and it tastes sort-of like liquid oatmeal with brown sugar) and is very nutritious and an aphrodisiac. Ms. Julca’s drive is extraordinary and if her next business venture is anything like the rest of her life, it is sure to be a resounding success. Thank you for your loan and becoming a part in Ms. Julca’s entrepreneurial endeavors.

One quick note: EDAPROSPO is waiting until the end of the loan to write their journal updates. In this way, they hope to be able to show you a ‘social impact’ of a loan, something that may be hard to assess only a month after receiving the loan. They thank you for your support of their clients. If you would like to see other clients currently fundraising via EDAPROSPO, please click here.

During a routine audit of Field Partner EDAPROSPO, Kiva discovered a number of discrepancies between the information posted to the Kiva website and what actually occurred on the ground. Specifically, many loans uploaded to the website before December 2008 contain inaccurate loan amounts, terms and/or loan uses.

This is in violation of Kiva policy, and as such, as soon as we were alerted to a possible violation we placed EDAPROSPO on "pause." After placing them on pause, Kiva proceeded to execute a complete verification of every loan EDAPROSPO posted to the Kiva website; in total we examined 757 loans.

As a result of our audit, we have discovered that 52% of the loans posted to the Kiva website by field partner EDAPROSPO contain data inaccuracies. 98% of these inaccuracies pertain to loans posted to the Kiva website before December 2008, when EDAPROSPO was under a different management team. After significant management turnover at the end of 2008, almost all loans on the Kiva website contain complete and accurate information and these loans comprise only 2% of the total discovered inaccuracies.

You are receiving this email as we wanted to alert you that, after our verification efforts, Kiva cannot confirm that the specific loan you funded was actually disbursed. We can, however, confirm that the person you lent to is an EDAPROSPO borrower. Because EDAPROSPO has decided to guarantee all loans made on Kiva, you have continued to receive repayments on schedule.

Because the new management team has proven that they are committed to providing accurate and transparent information to the Kiva website, and because they have repaid almost all of the inaccurate loans on-time, Kiva has decided to re-open the Kiva-EDAPROSPO relationship. During this new "pilot" phase on Kiva, we will be working closely with the new EDAPROSPO team, including their internal and external auditors, to continually verify new EDAPROSPO loans posted to Kiva, and if we are alerted to any new inaccuracies we will pause their relationship with Kiva and follow-up accordingly.

If you have any questions, please visit Kiva's Help Center at http://www.kiva.org/about/help.