Vanessa

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Vanessa 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.

Ms. Vanessa Cruz Cordova is a 25 year-old woman in Comas - a northern suburb of Lima, Peru – who seemingly has the blessed ability to balance the many demands of work and home in a successful and cheerful manner. Vanessa lives with her mother, grandmother, and her three-year-old son. She is the treasurer for the local EDAPROSPO lending group that also includes her grandmother, Teresa Huaman Sanchez. With her mother’s recent illness, Vanessa has moved her informal restaurant from her old location in Los Olivos (a neighboring northern suburb of Lima) to the front of her now-shared house. She has worked at selling food for 7 to 8 years and learned from the best; her mother was the cook at a popular comedor (food kitchen for low-income families). Every afternoon at 4pm, Ms. Cruz Cordova begins preparing the food for her dinner customers. She makes a variety of dishes, normally chicharron de pescado (fried fish) and alitas (fried chicken wing) but also sells hamburgers and pachamanca (like a pot roast but with pork, beef, chicken, potatoes, corn, etc. prepared in a gigantic pot or, more traditionally, in a makeshift oven from a hole dug in the ground) among others upon request. She drags a table and some chairs and places them on the sidewalk in front of her house. By 6 or 7pm, customers begin arriving. She sells the chicken wings for 2 soles a plate and the fried fish for 2.5 soles; on average she sells 30 plates of the former and 15 to 20 of the latter. With this amount of sales, Vanessa makes around 60 to 80 soles in profits a day. By 11.30pm or so, the food is all sold out and her night is finished; she tells me this is always the case. Vanessa’s culinary skills have quite the reputation and she is now often asked to cater for weddings and baptisms that happen in surrounding neighborhoods.

Beyond her knack for making a tasty dinner, Vanessa has a knack for taking care of the needs of others. While a loan officer and I interviewed her for this update, Vanessa brought us Inka Colas (the national drink of Peru [non-alcholic…pisco sours are the alcoholic drink]…Inkas taste like a bubble-gum flavored soda). She asked for this loan shortly after she separated from her husband. She realized that she now had to look after her young boy on her own and needed a little capital to start her own business. She told me that since she also must look after her mother with her recent illness, working in an office was not an option for her. So while Vanessa may have been pushed into the food selling business by various family circumstances, her talent with cooking may well have pulled her in a happier time. Vanessa now dreams of opening up her own restaurant. Thank you for your loan; behind every business there is a story and you never know what a little bit of start-up capital can do to help a business and more importantly, a business owner.

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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.