Allpaurccuna Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to the Allpaurccuna group, consisting of Teodosia, Julian, Emiliano, Victor, Enrique, Esperanza, Deonisia, Teofila, Isabel, Felicitas, Hipolito, Juana Severina by FINCA Peru in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 6 months, FINCA Peru will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

On Friday, I spoke with Isabel, Hipolito and Julian, three members of the Allpaurccuna Village Bank, the group you made a loan to last July. The group members live in a village located about an hour and a half outside of FINCA’s regional headquarters in Ayacucho. The group has just finished repaying its first loan,* and was planning on disbanding after that, but the group’s loan officer has convinced it to continue on for another loan cycle.

Isabel used her Kiva loan of 600 soles to buy avocados and prickly pear. Sales have improved since she invested her loan, she tells me. She knows that her business will grow slowly, since she has just started to work with FINCA, but she is excited about the possibility of getting ahead in life.

I speak to Hipolito through Isabel, who translates my Spanish questions into Quechua and his Quechua answers into Spanish for me. Hipolito used his loan of 2000 soles to buy more rice, sugar, pasta and cooking oil for his dry goods store. Each sack of rice costs between 120 and 160 soles, depending on quality. He is now selling more, and has been able to expand his business significantly since he started working with FINCA. Isabel says that seeing larger, well-established businesses like Hipolito’s inspire her to keep working hard so that she can grow her own business.

Julian used his Kiva loan of 300 soles to buy more cactus to dry and sell. Julian farms cactus himself (“cochinilla,” or prickly pear cactus, which is dried and used as a natural dye for cosmetics and other products), so with his loan he bought additional cactus from his neighbors, dried the plants and sold them in bulk to purchasers who visit him at home to collect the cactus. Business has been a bit slow lately, Julian says, but it’s normal for him to have good months and slow months. Julian has been working with FINCA for three years now; before then, his wife was a FINCA client, and Julian replaced her when she was no longer able to attend group meetings.

All three group members say they have been happy with their FINCA loans overall, and all are planning on continuing to work with the Allpaurccuna group for the foreseeable future. The group is pictured below with Norma, their loan officer, on the right.

*Note: Because Kiva’s system for tracking repayments is slightly delayed and does not record payments until they have been deposited into lenders’ accounts, the Allpaurccuna group appears to have repaid just half of its loan when in fact they have repaid 100% and are now entering into their second loan cycle.

Clarification: Allpaurccuna’s Kiva profile stated that group members planned to buy tuna, cochineal, tara, young animals and fertilizer. The Spanish word “tuna” is not tuna fish, but prickly pear (which grows on the “cochinilla” cactus, a plant used to make reddish dyes for cosmetics and other products). Tara is a pod that grows on trees in the Ayacucho region and is used to tan leather.