Ceneida Tapia López

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Ceneida Tapia López 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. Tapia has worked in her bodega for four years. While the hours are extraordinarily long (5am to 11pm everyday), Ceneida says she prefers it to her previous job of selling clothing, if only because this job is in the front of her house and so she can see her children everyday. Her store operates both as a grocery for her neighbors and a kiosk of snacks and sodas for the neighborhood kids. Her breakfast supplies for the customers comes in at 5am while the lunch supplies come in at 9am. The grocery products – vegetables, rice, sugar, breakfast items, etc. – used to be in the front of the store, but after several years she now has a reputation and can keep the groceries in the back of the store and people can just ask her. This arrangement works well because grocery buyers usually know what they want while kids who want snacks do not know what they want and thus what they see is what they will ask for (in other words, if all the cookies were hidden from view, no one would buy them while if all the eggs are hidden, people still ask for them). While that may seem that economics is pushing an unhealthy agenda (cookies in front, healthy foods hidden), she tells me that actually cookies and candies have the lowest profit margins while vegetables have the most profit potential (50% of their price is profit). Thus, economics remains a mixed bag in terms of health outcomes at least in the microeconomic paradigm of bodegas in the suburbia of Lima, Peru.

Your loan helped Mrs. Tapia specifically in the process of ordering supplies. Ceneida receives her merchandise from distributors (often a teenager on a bicycle) every week. She must ask for the items a week in advance and pay when they are delivered. Having a bigger base of capital from her access to the credit you provided allows her a greater cushion in her weekly orders (ie not as dependent on last week’s sales to finance next week’s products). This is particularly beneficial for the weeks with major holidays when she will need a greater supply of products than usual. Mrs. Tapia typically makes 20 soles in daily profits on weekdays and 30-40 soles daily on weekends. One interesting investment she recently made for her bodega was the purchase of a large thatch roof for the front patio. I thought it was purchased so people could sit and drink in front of her store but she told me it was actually because of the sun. In the late afternoons, the angle of the sun meant that the sunlight fell on the front of her store and melted the chocolates and cookies there. With the thatch roof, the store is cooler and the chocolate safe from the sunlight. As hinted at earlier in the description of her daily schedule, Mrs. Ceneida Tapia does all of her work for her children. She has three kids – ages 11, 9, and 5 – and her dream is that her hard work will allow them to study and one day become professionals. Thank you for your extension of credit to Mrs. Tapia and her business; it made a difference and is a credit to you as well.

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

I recently had the opportunity to visit the EDAPROSPO client you lent to and have posted a video on YouTube of our interaction. If the embedded video does not show up, please visit the YouTube location here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGPsnH9vkQc.

Enjoy!

Kiva Fellow Josh Bull

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.