Rocío Ortiz Alcántara

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Rocío Ortiz Alcántara 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.

Rocío Ortiz Alcántara has a stall in a market in Zona J of Huaycan, an exurb of Lima, Peru. As mentioned in her business profile, she has a husband and a baby daughter. Her business, as you may be able to tell by comparing these photos, has grown a lot since receiving your loan. While before she sold only clothing, she has since expanded to sell her mother’s various salsas, some food products, and little home improvement items (in Peru, a home improvement store is called a ferretería) in the glass counter shown.

Prior to opening her own business, Mrs. Ortiz Alcántara worked at another ferretería. Besides the noticeable increase in the amount and variety of products sold at her stall, the loan has also allowed Rocío to buy her stall space (before she rented) and has led to a 60% increase in her profits. She works everyday at the market from 7.30am to 1pm and then buys food, etc. Her short-term goal is to grow her business even more, primarily in home improvement products. In the long-term, she hopes to move out of this rather informal market and open a store in the more established (and paved) commercial center of Huaycan.

I have included a short video I took of Rocío and the market in which she works and you can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xde5UXcHr7k

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.