Socorro Berrocal Chipana

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Socorro Berrocal Chipana 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.

Mrs. Socorro Berrocal Chipana lives and works in the town of Huaycan, an exurb of Lima, Peru. She sells a large variety of chicken dishes both in the market near her house and walking around nearby neighborhoods. Every day at 4am she goes out to buy the ingredients for her meals and returns around 6 or 7am. At 8.30am she is at the market selling food and continues to do so until 1 or 2pm. At 4pm she goes back out, this time walking, and sells more food in nearby neighborhoods and plazas until 8 or 10pm. The real story of the impact of your loan, however, is the change in her family life.

Socorro lives on a hillside known as Zona J in a makeshift house with eleven other members of her family. Pictured are Socorro (right), her mother, her daughter, and her granddaughter (left), and her other daughter (right). Since receiving her loan, their situation has improved. She now makes 50 soles in profits a day and has the ability to buy a few items for her household. Nutrition-wise, the family used to have to go to a comedor (a food kitchen – many poor neighborhoods in Lima have these; they typically serve soups and at low costs) but now she can cook at home. Her daughter Maria Elena (far left) has also gotten into the family business and travels to a town 30 minutes away to sell various chicken meals as well. Before her relationship with EDAPROSPO (your loan was her second ever), she could only sell food when she had enough money to buy the ingredients. She worked in that unsteady method for almost twenty years. Given the success of her two loans so far (Maria Elena is now a client of EDAPROSPO as well!), Socorro hopes to use her next loan to buy a pollo broaster (rotisserie chicken). She believes business and her family’s situation will continue to get better but told me ‘only time will tell’. Thank you for being a part of this exciting period of Socorro and her family’s life.

I have included a short video I took of our visit to Mrs. Socorro Berrocal Chipana and her family here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wJ0fob2SNM

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.