Esther Vargas Torrico

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Esther Vargas Torrico by Fundación Agrocapital in Bolivia. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 12 months, Fundación Agrocapital will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

This afternoon, I visited Esther at her home, where she also runs her hair salon. Her house is located on a narrow street off of the main road in the neighborhood she lives in; a big wooden sign near the main road points clients towards her salon. She mostly does men’s haircuts, she says, and her salon is popular because it costs half as much as most of the salons in the Los Pozos neighborhood, where she used to work. Business has been better since she changed locations, she says: there is less competition in her neighborhood, plus she doesn’t have to pay rent on the salon. She usually serves between 15 and 18 clients each day, she tells me. She charges 5 bolivianos (about 70 cents) for adult haircuts and 4 bolivianos (55 cents) for children’s haircuts. Some of her clients come in because they see her sign or know her from the neighborhood, while others hear about her salon by word of mouth—since Esther’s prices are so low, many of her satisfied customers tell their friends.

Esther used her Kiva loan to equip her hair salon with some essentials she needed. “The loan from AgroCapital helped me out a ton [muchisimo],” says Esther. She tells me that she used to live in Argentina, and when she returned to Bolivia she came with nothing more than a bag with her clothes in it. She walks me through her house, and points out all of the things she’s bought with the money she has earned since she took out her first loan with AgroCapital: three beds, a television, a stereo, and a refrigerator, which is covered in snapshots of her children. “When I first took out, I didn’t have anything,” she tells me.

Esther is married (she is not a single mother, as was reported in her profile). Her husband is currently working as a security guard, which is a very dangerous job, especially in recent times, since there has been a lot of politically motivated violence and unrest in Santa Cruz in the past few months. Esther tells me that she’d like him to quit this job so that the couple can launch a business together. She hasn’t figured out all the details yet—she says she’s planning to ask her sister for advice, since she has more of a head for business.

Esther is a very responsible client, and always makes her repayments on time.