Zelma Flores

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Zelma Flores 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.

Zelma Flores is a mother of two- ages 11 and 4- who sells Salchipapas (a Peruvian dish consisting of French fries and cut-up hotdogs) from a stand in front of her house. She started her business almost three years ago and small loans like yours have helped improve her situation in that time. When she began her business, she had to rent her stand; now she owns it. With the loan you provided, she invested in sodas to sell along with her food as well as improving her cart. Currently she makes 25 soles in profits during weekdays and 80 soles on weekend and holidays. Owning her cart and having the sodas have helped boost her profits. Her daily routine involves buying potatoes from the market in the morning, preparing them in the afternoon, and selling her salchipapas in the evenings around 6pm to midnight. One interesting aside: She sometimes buys her potatoes from another Kiva entrepreneur, Domitila Julca .

Mrs. Flores’ dream for the immediate future is to open a restaurant in her house (where the photos have been taken). To do this, Zelma will need to make some improvements to the area. After her own stall has been converted into a restaurant, her long-term goal is to have a chain of restaurants in various locations and have other women work for her. Thank you for being a part of Mrs. Flores’ entrepreneurial journey.

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.