KIVA and the peanut farmer

Jiguisseme B Group Kafana Mali

In this Group: Mariam K, Kadia Ali, Mariam O, Saran, Assetou A, Toron, Awa Salif, Maria Modibo, Bintou, Mamine B

This month's KIVA loan goes to the ten members of the Jiguisseme B Group, all married women who are, on average, 38 years old and have three children. Most of them live in traditional families in the commune of Kafana, Sikasso district, Mali.

During the winter months, the women work with the KIVA field partner, Soro Yiriwaso, in order to improve their agricultural businesses. This will be their tenth group loan. The previous loans were all fully and correctly repaid.

Saran (in the yellow dress, standing second from the right in the photo) grows peanuts. She will use her loan to buy fertilizer, herbicide, and pay someone to help her work her acre land. She sells her peanuts in Sikasso. Saran expects to make a profit equal to about $150.00 USD, which will enable her to repay her loan and help her husband to provide for their family's day-to-day expenses.

This is a Group Loan

The other nine members of the group each have a small business which they will invest their $95.00 loan in to improve its profitability. In a group loan, each member of the group receives an individual loan but is part of a larger group of individuals. The group is there to provide support to the members and to provide a system of peer pressure, but groups may or may not be formally bound by a group guarantee. In cases where there is a group guarantee, members of the group are responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group members in the case of delinquency or default.

Soro Yiriwaso is a microfinance institution that works primarily in rural and semi-urban areas of Mali to provide underprivileged communities with access to financial services. The organization provides access for disadvantaged clients, particularly women, to new resources and services, fostering solidarity and cooperation among its clients. Kiva lenders’ funds enable Soro Yiriwaso to expand its outreach and target even more under served Malians involved in business and agriculture.

Many Kiva Field Partners implement innovative business practices and offer services in addition to their financial products to meet the needs of the people they serve. For example, many organizations partner with health-focused agencies to provide health care services to their clients who are more likely, as a result of good health, to be able to repay their loan. The inability to treat health related issues, when borrowers did not have access to health care, had the potential to cause them to fall back into the cycle of poverty despite running a successful business.

Other examples include institutions that stress the importance of education. This can mean loans that enable parents to start businesses and bolster their income so they can send their children to school, as well as educational workshops on topics that are not financial in nature, such as the prevention of disease and domestic violence.

This month we doubled our usual loan, in memory of our daughter Mary Margaret Isabel. Please consider joining us as KIVA partners and reaching out to lend a helping hand to a hard working business person.