Jacinta Sotomayor

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Jacinta Sotomayor by EDAPROSPO in Peru. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 6 months, EDAPROSPO will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Two weeks ago Jacinta was in a pretty bad accident when a minivan crashed into a mototaxi she was riding in. A mototaxi, if you haven’t heard of them, is a 50cc motorcycle shaped like a large tricycle with a small bench and a metal frame covering the passengers. She was left bloodied, without her four front teeth, blackened from the smoke, and with a hurt spine (she couldn’t sit down for the interview) but lucky to be alive. The timing was pretty bad considering it the first time she’s ever been in an accident, the mototaxi driver wasn’t properly insured, the minivan sped off, and her husband has recently left for Spain to look for work for two years. She has three children in their twenties that are helping her get through her recuperation. That said about her present condition, her past has gone well (the months of your loan) and the future looks good for her and her businesses. The following is an update on those two. Please keep Mrs. Sotomayor in your thoughts…and don’t worry about another accident, she assures me she won’t be riding in mototaxis for a long while.

Jacinta Sotomayor has been married for 25 years and has four children. She moved to this area of Vitarte from Ancash province (her husband is from Huaraz, the large town there…about 8 hours northeast of Lima). She used your loan to expand her business to include an internet café. During our conversation, customers appeared split between the bodega and the internet café, a sign that the business venture was a good one. Her current routine includes working 6am to 10pm every day at her store and waking up at 3am on Mondays and Wednesdays to buy vegetables. In the near future, she wants to put in a refrigerated counter so she can sell meat and dairy. Her dream is that her children will study until they become professionals (aka white collar workers).

Her experience with microfinance has been tremendously positive. EDAPROSPO uses lending groups (see Trust As A Foundation) as their mechanism for providing most loans and Jacinta is an active member in hers. She is the treasurer and says the role has allowed her to improve her skills with numbers. Though she only has a 2nd grade education and still has trouble reading and writing, she told me her numerical literacy has been engaged and strengthened. Jacinta loves the identity that women can have as part of lending groups; she is known as herself and this recognition thrills her. She particularly likes EDAPROSPO because of the independence it gives the women who use it (there are other microfinance organizations that continue to place heavy emphasis on the male as the head of household). Her friendships with the other women in her lending group are also instrumental to her life here in Vitarte. Her husband is in Barcelona, Spain looking for work for the next year and a half (been there 6 months already). When asked if she could consider moving there, she told me with a laugh that she would go only if her husband paid for the other 10 women in her EDAPROSPO lending group to come as well.

One development that looks promising for her bodega and internet café businesses is the impending pavement of her street (see Buses and Productivity for a brief description of how communities develop around Lima). When the road is paved, there will be more traffic and potential customers for her business. It used to be that cars could not even drive in her neighborhood because of the quality of the ‘road’. Recently it has been more dust pounded flat but the dust has not been kind to the neighborhood children who have asthma (or get asthma because of it). Mrs Sotomayor is a member of several community organizations. To get the road paved, they petitioned the municipality and agreed to split the costs of paving the street 50/50. She says that if a foreign donor wishes to help their community, the grant money will often go disproportionately to the municipality rather than what it intends: lowering the costs of the community (ie a 50,000 euro grant from a French NGO only turned into 36,000 for the community after the municipality added ‘pages’ of fees to the money). With this construction project, Mrs. Sotomayor will pay a share equaling 1000 soles over the course of 3 years (~30 soles a month). Adding her internet business will help her to pay these additional costs.

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.