Menyikwa Agri Business Self-help Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to the Menyikwa Agri Business Self-Help Group group, consisting of Martha Kerubo, Phillip Gwaro, Christopher Siki, Evans Anunda, Stephen Omari, Ernest Nyapara, Anthony Nyantike, Alice Waithera by Opportunity International- Wedco Ltd. in Kenya. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 3 months, Opportunity International- Wedco Ltd. will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Update by Zack Turner, Kiva Fellow with OI-Wedco in Kenya:

I met with Earnest at a group members café. Martha Kerubo, the representative for the groups Kiva business profile was too sick to meet for a journal update. Earnest volunteered as the secretary of the group and was kind enough to share about his business as well as provide a general update for the group. He is a kind and soft-spoken man and shared empathetically about the challenges the group has faced.

Ernest is married with two children who are seventeen and fifteen years old. The help from small loans has enabled him to afford to send them to government boarding schools and owning his house.

Ernest is a perfect example of a savvy and committed micro-entrepreneur. After his retirement as a schoolteacher he used his small pension to finance a small commercial rental property. He has owned a building with three rooms for small businesses for 15 years. The rental cost for a room is 2000 schillings per month ($30). He appreciates how his property helps other entrepreneurs to have a location to sell goods. From the profits of his rentals he invested in dairy cows. Currently, he has two adult cows and two calves. His wife helps by milking the cows daily while he sells the milk at the market. With his portion of the loan, Ernest attempted to enter into the profitable groundnuts business. He traveled to Busia, a border town to purchase nuts from Uganda at discounted price to sell for a high profit in Kisii. Unfortunately, his investment failed because it is no longer profitable due to the increase transportation and fuel prices.

Always the opportunist, his next diversification will be in charcoal. Which he hopes will continue to grow his overall profits.

One member of Menyikwa Agri Business, Phillip, lost an entire load of stock that he purchased in Nairobi. While he was traveling back on bus, thugs overtook the vehicle and took all the valuable goods.

The group stayed cohesive through the turmoil. They were able to maintain payments and members supported one another as they could. For the most part, the members are retired civil servants (teachers, police officers, and government workers).

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Special Note:

This loan was posted mid-cycle on Kiva for extraordinary reasons. After peace and stability was restored, Opportunity International-Wedco chose to reschedule the loans of groups impacted by the post-election crisis. Kiva offered to help by posting the groups that were rescheduled, thus this extended update.

A self-help group is a legal community of people that band together to provide collateral. In a group loan, each member of the group receives an individual loan but is part of a group of individuals bound by a 'group guarantee'. Under this arrangement, each member of the group supports one another and is responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group members if someone is delinquent or defaults. For the Kiva posting, we select one member to represent the group with their story and business.

For more regarding the post-election crisis please start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_Kenyan_crisis