Esther Wanjeri

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Esther Wanjeri by Women`s Economic Empowerment Consort in Kenya. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 10 - 18 months, Women`s Economic Empowerment Consort will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Esther is a 25-year old single mother operating a small hair salon and a beauty shop. She uses her profits to support her two year old son – Brian – who is watched by a house girl while she is at work from 7 am to 7:30pm every day and her grandmother who raised her. Next year her son is starting school which will cost KSH 3,000 per month (he will go to private school). Before she started her own business she was working as a shop assistant.

She launched her business a year ago using a combination of a Kiva loan provided through WEEC and her own savings (she invested KSH 150,000 to start the business of which KSH 20,000 was borrowed from WEEC). Over the past 10 months she has repaid the loan and she is now debt free.

She has three assistants employed in the shop and business appears to be going well. The hair salon generates KSH 40,000 per month (she does about 3-4 haircuts per day priced at KSH 500 each) in revenues and the beauty shop KSH 20,000. This generates a substantial surplus (KSH 30,000) every month after paying for rent (KSH 5,000 per month), assistants (KSH 5,000 each per month), and other expenses (KSH 10,000). Every month she is able to save KSH 5,000 after her personal expenses.

Shortly, Esther would like to grow her business ideally with another loan. She likes borrowing from WEEC because of the reasonable interest rate and less harsh conditions in the event that she has to postpone a repayment. She would, however, prefer to borrow individually rather than as part of a group next time.

Esther seems to be doing well and is clearly proud of the business she has managed to build over the past year.

Picture shows Esther, me, and Esther's loan representative from WEEC.

Kiva recently notified you that your loan to the business or businesses above will not be repaid in full and is now considered defaulted. As a reminder, any amount of this loan that has been collected by Kiva is available to you as Kiva Credit. You can re-lend this Kiva Credit to another business, withdraw it or donate to Kiva on our website: www.kiva.org.

Reason for default:

All entrepreneur profiles on Kiva’s website are posted by local Field Partners. This particular business was posted by our Kenyan Field Partner, the Women’s Economic Empowerment Consort (WEEC).

WEEC is currently experiencing significant operational difficulties that have caused all active WEEC loans to default. It is important to note that in many cases the entrepreneur repaid the loan to WEEC in full and did benefit from your loan. However, WEEC has experienced operational problems caused by a number of factors, including the unexpected death of WEEC’s founder and Executive Director, poor management of funds, and economic and political unrest in Kenya. Together, these factors produced a situation where Kiva is unable to get a 100% clear account of your specific loan and recover your full loan amount from WEEC.

To learn more, please visit:

www.kiva.org/about/aboutPartner?id=6

We hope you realize that this outcome is an exception to the norm when lending at Kiva and that you’ll give lending another chance. If you have any questions, please let us know and thanks again for your ongoing support.

Sincerely,

Shelby Clark

Kiva Staff