Thi Nguyen Pham's Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to the group, consisting of Thi Nguyen Pham, Thi Thi Le, Kim Hoa Nguyen, Thi Hop Do, Thi Lan Hoang, Thi Mnh Chu by SEDA in Viet Nam. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 12 months, SEDA will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

This past week I met with Pham Thi Nguyen, the leader of her group near Dong Anh, a suburb of Hanoi. Her group consists of four other members, who I unfortunately did not get to meet. Ms. Pham, a widow, lives with her 5-year old nephew as all of her children are now married and live out of the house.

Ms. Pham only completed grade 8 here in Vietnam, but nonetheless she works hard and is very kind. She used her loan of 4,700,000 VND to purchase extra food products so that she could expand her food service business. Every morning she makes noodle dishes that she sells for breakfasts and for lunch and dinner she makes traditional Vietnamese soups like pho. Before her Kiva loans she only made around 40,000 VND in profit a day but now after four previous loans she has increased her daily profits to around 80,000 VND. This is a very significant increase and shows that her business is in fact doing much better!

When asked what she uses her new income for, Ms. Pham replied that for the most part she reinvests it in her business but has also used some of her new income to increase her standard of living by purchasing a television! Before we parted I asked her one final question about her hopes and dreams and her response was very simple yet powerful: she wants to expand her business further so that she can make even more money and help her nephew get through school. I’m always thrilled to see microfinance have such an impact on peoples lives, even if the business is simple, because it confirms why I am out here working as a Kiva Fellow!