Thi Xuan Vu's Group

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to the Thi Xuan Vu group, consisting of Thi Xuan Vu, Thi Ba Nguyen, Thi Nam Dinh, Thi Thuy Dinh, Thi Huong Nguyen 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.

Recently I had the pleasure in meeting Ms. Vu Thi Xuan, 56 years old and group leader of this group. Ms. Vu was chosen to be the group leader, as well as the cluster leader, because everyone in her group and in her cluster admires her for all the work she has done for the community over the years. Ms. Vu works for the Women’s Union in her village and through that learned about SEDA and microfinance and has since been an advocate for SEDA’s services within her village.

Ms. Vu has been running her dry goods shop since 1982 and enjoys her job. She used her Kiva loan to purchase additional inventory for her store and purchases her inventory from Hanoi, which his roughly two hours away from where she lives. Because of her loan, she has seen her income become less volatile; previously her income was anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 VND a day, or roughly $3 to $6. Now that she has her loan her income has stabilized to around 80,000 to 100,000 VND per day. She uses her income to help pay for her family’s living expenses and to puts roughly 50,000 to 70,000 VND per week into savings.

Ms. Vu’s family is rather large: four children, a father and mother in-law and two grandchildren who all live in her home. Two of her children are married and have trucks that they use to ship things, including her goods from Hanoi. One of her daughters, however, has a disability. When she was 8 months old she had a disease attack her brain and as a result her left arm is paralyzed. While Ms. Vu hopes to make more money in the future, she also hopes that this daughter will always be taken care of and that her family will always be there for the daughter. She works hard, with the support of her family, to ensure that everyone lives an adequate life.