Pamela Akinyi

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Pamela Akinyi by Kisumu Medical & Education Trust (K-MET) in Kenya. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 18 months, Kisumu Medical & Education Trust (K-MET) will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Greetings from Kenya!

I’m Alison Carlman, a Kiva Fellow working with K-MET in Kisumu. You’re receiving this e-mail because you contributed to a loan for one of K-MET’s borrowers on Kiva. Thank you for supporting these inspiring business people. I wanted to give you an update about what many of them are doing!

Most of K-MET’s borrowers are volunteers promoting health and education in their communities. This means that not only are they micro-entrepreneurs (selling vegetables, doing tailoring, or running some other business in town), but they also regularly take time out of their working day to visit orphans, children, widows, and other sick or vulnerable people in their community. They work with K-MET supervisors to refer malnourished children and ill patients to the outpatient clinic or to the hospital. They also make sure that caregivers have the right information about how to care for their families and neighbors.

The community health care workers (mostly women) form a corps of empowered volunteers who are changing their communities from the ground up; many of them live on less than $1 a day. Earlier this week, a woman told me that she’d like Kiva lenders to know that “we visit the sick. We take care of the sick. At times, the sick will not have anything, and we are forced to give money from our own pockets so that they can eat.” This is truly a group of people who are sharing their small amount of resources with each other to serve more than 4,000 at-risk people in Kisumu.

I’d like you to see this short video demonstrating the work that community health workers do and the conditions in which they work and live. The first shot is of Alice, a Kiva borrower and tailor in the Nyalenda slum of Kisumu. She is pictured at her sewing and embroidery stall. I followed her as she and her K-MET supervisor, Beatrice, visited some of Alice’s patients in the community. I hope that by seeing and hearing the story of Alice you are as inspired as I am by the work that K-MET’s Kiva borrowers are doing!

Thanks again for your support of K-MET and Kiva entrepreneurs. Please consider joining the K-MET Fans Lending Team to continue following this field partner.

Kiva Love,

Alison Carlman

KF8, K-MET Kisumu, Kenya

Pamela Akinyi has been a member of the K-MET community health workers for 4 years now. Before we begin this interview she tells me to make sure kiva lenders know that she is very grateful for their support. Pamela is currently repaying her fifth loan by kiva and she says that all these loans have pushed her business a stair higher than the previous.

Pamela is a proud mother of five children; a boy and four girls. She runs clothing and transportation businesses. She says her loan went into both businesses; that is restocking of the clothes for sale and buying spare parts for and servicing of the vehicle respectively.

Her main difficulty recently was when her stock of clothes got stolen while in transit from Kampala, Uganda to Kisumu, Kenya. If it was not for her emergency kitty of savings for the business, she says she would be out of business by now. Fluctuations of prices in both businesses are also an issue, but she says business is doing well and she has been able to counter these difficulties here and there. Besides she says, once you learn to run a business and are keen enough to predict the market, thing will sort of always work for you.

Her future dreams are to open a branch of the clothing business and buy another passenger service vehicle.