Gloria

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Gloria by Microfinanzas PRISMA in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 6 months, Microfinanzas PRISMA will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Mrs. Gloria Meza Lobos works with her extended family in a farming community in a valley about an hour outside of Tarma, Peru. She used your loan to invest in this season’s harvest. Every 6 months, Mrs. Meza and her family harvest a variety of crops including potatoes and carrots. At the time of this interview, Gloria’s mother and several others were busy harvesting their potato crop, loading it into sacks, and placing them in stacks near the roadway to be picked up by a truck. This loan was her third loan with PRISMA and she says the experience has been a good one; the extra capital has allowed her family to increase the size of their sowing.

The capital injection you provided with your $25+ works like this for Mrs. Meza: Gloria uses the money to buy sacks of seeds for the upcoming growing season. In her area, Gloria and other farmers rent their land by the number of seed sacks they use, not by square meters. To rent the land for each sack of seeds planted, Mrs. Meza pays 25 soles for the season. Thus, as Mrs. Meza planted 2 sacks of potato seeds for this growing season, it will cost her 50 soles to rent the land for the next six months; this sum she pays up front. For an example, a two-sack field of potatoes is the size of the brown field behind Gloria in the picture below. In addition to the land rent, Gloria has to buy the sacks of seeds, which for potatoes cost 50 to 60 soles a sack. Having a ready supply of capital to cover all of these upfront costs allows Gloria to buy more sacks of seeds and thus reap a bigger harvest (and profits) in the months ahead. When the harvest comes, about half of the revenue goes to cover the costs of growing the crops and the other half is profit. At times her loan may not always fit exactly to the growing season at which time she buys animals to raise alongside her crops; in the (two-sack) field where we interviewed Gloria, there were two sheep tied up as well. Gloria lives with her husband and her two children, ages 10 and 6. The ten-year-old, Herson, is pictured here with her. Thank you for your ‘seed’ capital to Gloria’s agricultural endeavors; may you reap what you sow.