María Guadalupe Rodriguez Torres

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to María Guadalupe Rodriguez Torres by EDAPROSPO in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 4 months, EDAPROSPO will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Guadalupe “Lupita” Rodriguez Torres is an entrepreneur without equal. Inspired by the verse that exhorts Christians to work ‘while it is still yet light’, Lupita does just that. Her first business venture was selling breakfast to workers at three nearby leather factories. She has since expanded that line of food sales to include lunches as well. At 9 or 9.30am every morning she makes her rounds with breakfasts. In addition to her breakfasts and lunches, Lupita also makes pastries, juices, extracts, jellos, and flan. She recently bought a large fridge to store her burgeoning food venture.

On top of her daily food sales, Lupita also works with leather that she can buy cheaply from the factories nearby. She has her own leather-working machine and makes leather purses, bags, jackets, pillows, mini-skirts, coinbags, etc. When she tires of leather, she also sews a variety of fabrics. In the picture she is showing a throw rug she recently sewed; she makes a wide variety of clothing products as well.

Not content with three types of food sales, leatherworking, and sewing, Lupita also sells products from catalogues. Every month she gets several catalogues from Avon, eSika, etc. She then goes around her neighborhood and sells the makeup, clothes, and household items to her neighbors and receives a 25% commission from the manufacturers. Lupita also utilizes this network of clients to sell her own products as well. Always active and always social, Lupita has formed two lending groups at EDAPROSPO and acts as treasurer in at least one of them (see Trust as a Foundation for more on EDAPROSPO lending groups). While I was interviewing her, she was busily recruiting two more women into a third lending group.

Still not content with three types of food sales, leatherworking, sewing, catalogue-selling, and lending team former, Lupita has recently bought a washing machine and plans to open a laundry service very soon. In addition, she rents out four rooms on the second floor of her house. With her most recent loan, Lupita bought materials for and built an area outside of her house to open a small restaurant and bodega. She plans on using the profits to build a third story to her house so that she can rent out more rooms. An incredibly vivacious and amiable host, Lupita told me, after giving me a handmade leather coinbag and homemade jello, that her motto is to work hard and fight hard while living then one day God will take her and she can rest. Thank you for being a part of Lupita’s frenetic entrepreneurial activity. I can assure you your money has never had a more productive time than Lupita’s several month use of it. I have included a short video I took while visiting her here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mERFjy3apMU

One quick note, EDAPROSPO is waiting until the end of loans to provide a journal update. In this way, they hope that you can get a better sense of the social impact of your loan. If you would like to lend to other businesses with EDAPROSPO, please click here for their currently fundraising entrepreneurs on Kiva.

During a routine audit of Field Partner EDAPROSPO, Kiva discovered a number of discrepancies between the information posted to the Kiva website and what actually occurred on the ground. Specifically, many loans uploaded to the website before December 2008 contain inaccurate loan amounts, terms and/or loan uses.

This is in violation of Kiva policy, and as such, as soon as we were alerted to a possible violation we placed EDAPROSPO on "pause." After placing them on pause, Kiva proceeded to execute a complete verification of every loan EDAPROSPO posted to the Kiva website; in total we examined 757 loans.

As a result of our audit, we have discovered that 52% of the loans posted to the Kiva website by field partner EDAPROSPO contain data inaccuracies. 98% of these inaccuracies pertain to loans posted to the Kiva website before December 2008, when EDAPROSPO was under a different management team. After significant management turnover at the end of 2008, almost all loans on the Kiva website contain complete and accurate information and these loans comprise only 2% of the total discovered inaccuracies.

You are receiving this email as we wanted to alert you that, after our verification efforts, Kiva cannot confirm that the specific loan you funded was actually disbursed. We can, however, confirm that the person you lent to is an EDAPROSPO borrower. Because EDAPROSPO has decided to guarantee all loans made on Kiva, you have continued to receive repayments on schedule.

Because the new management team has proven that they are committed to providing accurate and transparent information to the Kiva website, and because they have repaid almost all of the inaccurate loans on-time, Kiva has decided to re-open the Kiva-EDAPROSPO relationship. During this new "pilot" phase on Kiva, we will be working closely with the new EDAPROSPO team, including their internal and external auditors, to continually verify new EDAPROSPO loans posted to Kiva, and if we are alerted to any new inaccuracies we will pause their relationship with Kiva and follow-up accordingly.

If you have any questions, please visit Kiva's Help Center at http://www.kiva.org/about/help.