Gloria Damián Reyes

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Gloria Damián Reyes by EDAPROSPO in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 5 months, EDAPROSPO will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Gloria Damián Reyes is an entrepreneur living in the town of Chosica about 90 minutes east of Lima, Peru. Her primary business is selling prepared food at her little shop in a market near the central plaza of Chosica. Much has changed for her family and her business in the two years she has been working and the loan she received from you has certainly helped in that story of progress.

Mrs. Reyes says that when she started her kitchen, there was no water, no tables, and no fridge. Through her relationship with EDAPROSPO, she has been able to buy a fridge (now she can store excess food and prepare it more easily at the store), to buy tables (now customers can eat at the store), and has recently gotten a pipe put in so now she has access to water all day. With your loan, she was able to buy a car that she rents out as a taxi. She rents it for 30 soles a day and loves it because she is now earning more money with not much extra effort; it is adding another revenue stream to the family income.

Gloria works at her small food store from 8am to 10pm from Monday to Saturday. Since her stall is located at the edge of a large market, she buys her vegetables daily from other vendors without much hassle. Two or three times a week she travels 30 minutes away to Vitarte to buy more types of food for her meals. Like most small Peruvian restaurants, Mrs. Reyes has a daily menu, which is a fixed meal with starter, entrée, and drink. She sells these for 4 soles each. In addition, she sells special plates (lomo saltado [strips of steak with sautéed onions and peppers, rice, and French fries], arroz chaufa [fried rice], tallarin saltada [spaghetti with vegetables], trucha, pachamarca, etc.) for 6 soles each. Before her loan, she could sell 20 to 25 menus a day; now she sells 40 a day.

Pictured with Gloria is her son, Jason. Jason and Gloria’s daughter-in-law work with Gloria at her burgeoning food sales shop. People often order menus and Jason delivers them to their stores in Tupperware containers for his mother. He told me that his situation has improved after his mother received this loan. He says that now they can afford more gustos (non-necessities) at home, which he enjoys. As regards the future, Gloria said that she wishes to move to a bigger locale and open a full-size restaurant. The current space is rented and quite small. In addition, her experience with buying a car to rent to a taxi driver has been very profitable and enjoyable and she wishes to buy another car to do the same. Thank you for being a part of the rapid story of progress that is Mrs. Gloria Damián Reyes.

I have included a short video I took of our search for her stall. You can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qzKjlMFBVU

One quick note, EDAPROSPO is waiting until the end of loans to provide a journal update. In this way, they hope that you can get a better sense of the social impact of your loan. If you would like to lend to other businesses with EDAPROSPO, please click here for their currently fundraising entrepreneurs on Kiva.

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.