Melia D. is from the village of Bacnor East. She is 46 years old. Melia is the group leader of a 7-member group loan offered by ASKI/Kiva. While each member of the group receives an individual loan, they are all collectively responsible for paying back the loans of their fellow group members if someone is delinquent or defaults. The official name of this borrowing group is Melia D. group.

Melia is married and has 4 school-aged children. She owns and operates a general store. The main source of income for the business comes from selling a variety of different products in the local community. Melia has been involved in her business for over 5 years and earns approximately 5,000 PHP a month from these activities.

In 2009, Melia joined ASKI to gain access to financial services to help improve her living situation and ability to engage in business activities. Melia has successfully repaid a previous loan of 7,000 PHP from ASKI, which was used to to purchase additional products to sell. Melia is requesting a second loan of 15000 PHP which will be used to purchase new items to expand product offering. She plans to use the additional revenue generated from the business to improve/expand her business.

About ASKI:

ASKI is one of the most successful microfinance institutions in the Philippines. It has 25 branches covering the Central and Northeastern areas. Its clients are mostly farmers, fisherfolks and small entrepreneurs.

*Note: To maximize efficiency and reduce costs, this loan was posted using a template to automate the translation by Kiva. Given that manual translation of entrepreneur profiles is costly, Kiva created this template for our Field Partner to allow them to continue to post loans in English while providing quality and accurate information to Kiva lenders.