Adelaide Asante

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Adelaide Asante by Christian Rural Aid Network in Ghana. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 7 months, Christian Rural Aid Network will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Adelaide is married woman of 47 years and the mother of four children. She has received schooling through junior high. She now runs a general store in Amamoma where she sells a wide variety of items including soft drinks, groceries, water satchels, and stationary. Adelaide used to sell eggs in Cape Coast at a roadside stand where she made a profit of approximately 1,200 cedis ($1,200) per month. She wanted to have an official store, however, so she moved to a new location in the neighboring town of Amamoma, where Cape Coast University is located.

But once in her new store, she quickly realized that eggs did not sell as well in Amamoma as they had in town. Furthermore, she observed that the students regularly purchased groceries and stationery. After seeing her profits decrease, Adelaide decided to end her egg-selling business and to open a general store instead. Now selling goods that catered to the needs of the community, her profits improved significantly. She encountered a new challenge, however. She had previously purchased the eggs on credit and would pay back the supplier once she sold the eggs. In her new business, she had to pay in cash up front. As a result, she looked to CRAN for a loan so she could increase and diversify her inventory. With her first loan from CRAN, she purchased soft drinks, stationery, groceries, and cosmetics. Since then, Adelaide’s profits have doubled from 1,400 cedis ($1,400) per month to 2,800 cedis per month. She also increased her susu savings deposit from 1 cedi per day to four cedis per day. In addition, she began setting aside five cedis a day for her loan repayment.

Adeliade says that the loan had a number of positive effects on her life aside from her business. With the increase in profits, she was able to begin sending 10 cedis every month to her father, and the financial pressure in her household decreased as well. Others noticed the improvement in her shop and came to her asking if she could provide them with loans too. Furthermore, as the group leader of her lending group, Adelaide has set a positive example for the other borrowers.