Funded

Total loan: $5,500

Riziki's Group

Ndigiria, Kenya / Agriculture

A loan helped a member to pay for eucalyptus seedlings, fertilizer, training and plantation maintenance support.

Riziki's Group's story

Riziki is a thirty-two-year-old single mother of five children. She works on other people's farms for income and is paid by relief-service non-governmental organizations to dig for water. Her job working on farms is seasonal and sometimes she misses the opportunity to work for the relief organizations due to a high supply of local labor.

Riziki is "fed up with the impoverished life she is exposed to and hopes to benefit from the sale of trees to enable her to live a decent life." She is joining the KOMAZA micro-forestry program so that she can educate her children, build a house and start other businesses with the profits from her tree farm.

In this group: Riziki, Karembo, Kabibi, Dhahabel, Charo, Kenga, Safari, Sidi, Magaret, Sidi, Kabibi

More about this loan

About KOMAZA Forestry Ltd.:

KOMAZA is a social enterprise founded to convert Africa?s drylands into productive family farms in the eastern part of Kenya. The organization equips smallholder farmers with the supplies and training they need to plant fast-growing and sustainable eucalyptus or melia trees on their unused or underutilized land. In addition to generating income for farmers and their families, KOMAZA's sustainable farming practices help to offset deforestation and provide a stable, affordable source of fuel.

Please note that this loan term is for 10 years. KOMAZA works with farmers over the course of this time period to help them grow healthy and regenerative trees that are then sold as wood commodities. This loan will cover the upfront cost of seeds, fertilizers, and KOMAZA?s staff time needed to support the farmer over the course of the loan term, including multiple harvest cycles.

This model generates years of income for the farmers? families and creates a sustainable wood supply for local markets. Kiva lenders? flexible, risk-tolerant capital enables KOMAZA to offer affordable financing to farmers, and to scale faster as an organization to impact more people. Repayments for this loan will come from revenues generated by wood sales, and profits from harvested trees are split equally between the farmer and KOMAZA.

See the story of Ruth and Raphael, KOMAZA farmers, here: