Demecio

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Demecio by Fundación Agrocapital, a partner of ACDI/VOCA in Bolivia. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 24 months, Fundación Agrocapital, a partner of ACDI/VOCA will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

I visit the small neighborhood store Demecio owns with his wife one hot afternoon in Warnes, a small town about thirty minutes outside of the city of Santa Cruz in tropical eastern Bolivia. Demecio is out working (he drives a taxi shuttling passengers between Santa Cruz and Warnes), and his wife Marta is running the store, so I sit down to chat with her for a bit about the loan the couple took out from AgroCapital.

Marta tells me that they used the loan to buy more supplies for her store, like stuffed animals and toys, and to install a call center. She buys stuffed animals for 13 bolivianos apiece (about $1.85) and resells them for 16 or 18 bolivianos ($2.30 to $2.65). Sundays are her best days for sales, and on a good day she can earn 200 to 300 bolivianos ($29 to $43). She says she ‘s selling a bit more now than she used to, but that the loan didn’t really make that much of a difference. “With $1000 you can’t do anything, everything is so expensive nowadays,” she tells me, sounding frustrated. She says she would like to repay this loan, then take out a slightly larger loan of $1500 or so. Still, she says, she knows she has to be careful not to take out more money than she can repay.