Vilma Torres Moreno

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Vilma Torres Moreno 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.

Vilma Torres Moreno runs a bodega out of her house in the suburb of San Martin de Porres on the outskirts of Lima, Peru. Her loan has had an unusually large impact on her monthly profits because of the nature of her business and the effect a little extra capital can have on it. Mrs. Torres Moreno has a bodega (typical shop that sells soda, snacks, cookies, and common household needs like toilet paper) in the front of her house but her many form of income is a thriving products-via-catalogue business that she runs alongside the bodega. Vilma’s relationship with microfinance began when she sought a little capital to begin her catalogue sales business. With a ready display counter in her bodega, she could invite friends and regular customers to see the products available in this month’s catalogue. Vendors of catalogue sales receive a percentage of the total sales after each ‘sales campaign’. They gather requests from friends, family, and customers, submit the bundled requests to the catalogue company (in Vilma’s case: eSika), receive the products 5 days later, and then have 15 days to collect payments and distribute the product to the clients. When all of the payments have been collected, Vilma deposits the money in eSika’s account at a local bank and is immediately refunded a percentage of the deposit.

Your loan helped Vilma in a significant way. Vilma can use the capital to buy products in advance that she is sure she can sell in the upcoming weeks (and display in her store counter). By buying and selling at a higher volume, Vilma receives a higher percentage of profits. In fact, she was able to move from 25% to 36% because of her increased sales volume. It is an ever-increasing circle: higher volume means higher profits of course, but also a higher percentage which increases profits even more. Mrs. Torres Moreno then cycles her profits into buying products for her bodega and helping it grow. The ‘sales campaigns’ for her catalogue business are every 3 weeks and she sells 2500 soles on average each campaign.

Vilma Torres Moreno has two married children (one son and one daughter) who live in their own houses and two grandchildren: one is seven years old and the other is seven months old. Vilma lives with her husband and the seven-year-old grandchild. Her hopes are to keep working and maybe, one day, move to the United States or especially Spain to work. She moved in 1979 from the sierra province of Ancash (the city of Huaraz, to be specific…it’s 8 hours north of Lima and the jumping-off spot for backpackers trying to conquer the continent’s 2nd tallest peak of nearby Huascaran) to Lima but thanks to profits from her two businesses, has the opportunity and ability to travel there often to visit family and friends. Thank you for being a part of Vilma Torres Moreno’s businesses and letting your little extra capital allow Vilma to increase her catalogue sales business enough to jump to a significantly higher percentage band.

If you would like to support other clients of EDAPROSPO currently fundraising on Kiva, please click here.

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.