Mariana

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Mariana by Fundación Agrocapital in Bolivia. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 9 months, Fundación Agrocapital will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

I visit Mariana at home one sunny Monday morning. She is home with her 9-year-old daughter, who goes to school in the afternoon (this is common in Bolivia). Mariana tells me that she’s disappointed because the soccer team she plays on lost a big match yesterday.

Thankfully, her business is doing better than her game. She sells cosmetics in the afternoons while her daughter is in school, and says her business has taken a big step forward since she used her loan from AgroCapital to buy more perfume and makeup to sell. “I’m getting ahead,” she tells me. Many clients told their friends about her products, so she has added new clients and has been selling more lately. She also sells many products to nurses who work at a local medical center. In a good month, she earns US$80, while in a slow month she makes $50 or $60. Mariana also receives child support payments of 800 bolivianos (US $114) each month and works part-time as a secretary.

Mariana has now fully repaid this loan*, and has taken out another loan from AgroCapital to finish some construction work on the home she owns and lives in with her daughter. She recently had a tile floor put in.

Someday, she’d like to open up a Yambal cosmetics agency in her home, she tells me.

Correction: Mariana’s daughter studies at a public school, not a business school, as stated in her original Kiva profile because of a translation error.

* Kiva’s current system for recording repayments (which is in the process of being phased out) assumes borrowers will repay a set amount each month. Since Mariana repaid her loan sooner than she was expected to, the extra money she repaid has not yet been recorded. This is why it appears that her loan has not yet been fully repaid. This will be corrected, and within the next few weeks lenders will be fully repaid.