Caroline Akoth

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Caroline Akoth by SEED Development Group in Kenya. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 6 - 9 months, SEED Development Group will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

This loan has enabled me to expand my business. This has brought me better income and life has become better.

Caroline is an inspiring example of SEED’s impact on the Kisumu community within Kenya. In applying for this loan, her vision was to move beyond her cyber café and establish a program for computer education by means of microfinance lending.

Shortly after receiving the funds from the loan, Caroline founded the Dantech Computer College with diverse course offerings from basic computer skills to full certification for computer related fields. A sample of courses include: computer introduction, word processing, spreadsheets, database management, technical design, statistical methods, programming, and web design. Classes are offered six days a week from 8-10am, 10-12pm, 12-4pm, and 5-7pm. To assist her with this demanding schedule, she’s employed four additional instructors to divide the work and specialize in the various academic areas.

Since opening Dantech, class attendance has progressively increased and Caroline is now considering further expansion. She would like to open a new cyber café in the same building to encourage the local community’s use of computers. While not wanting to use any of her existing equipment for this new business, she is currently saving to purchase more computers to accomplish this goal.

Her overwhelming success in this new business has dramatically helped her family overcome previous financial struggles. Caroline has since been able to comfortably afford her children’s school fees, while saving profit for the cyber café.

The business(es) listed above was posted on Kiva's website by our Kenyan Field Partner, SEED Development Group. Our Field Partners are independent microfinance institutions that lend to the poor for poverty alleviation. The role of a Field Partner is to screen each entrepreneur, post his/her profile on the Kiva website, disburse the loan, and collect loan repayments.

During an audit of SEED, Kiva discovered that SEED was not providing entrepreneurs with the full amount of their loans raised on Kiva. This violates Kiva's policies, so we have terminated our partnership with SEED.

Following this discovery, there was a thorough investigation of the situation. Ultimately, SEED defaulted on its entire loan portfolio with Kiva, which means that no further funds are collectible. To learn more about this particular situation and what Kiva is doing to prevent this in the future, please visit:

http://www.kiva.org/about/aboutPartner?id=32

Any repayment notifications you may have received up until this point are available to you as Kiva Credit. Please visit Kiva to re-lend, withdraw or donate this credit to Kiva.

Please realize that our audit uncovered a true exception to the norm; the vast majority of our Field Partners administer your loans with the highest integrity. Kiva will continue to audit Field Partners to monitor the integrity of your loan and to make our website a model for transparency in international development.

Thank you for your understanding and support of Kiva.