About Abaarso School of Science and Technology:

The Abaarso School of Science and Technology is a nonprofit educational institute launched in 2008 to provide primary, secondary, tertiary and graduate-level students with high-quality education in Somaliland. Kiva lenders can fund partial tuition loans to the families of high school students who could not afford to attend otherwise. By offering longer-term loans, with repayment periods up to five years, Kiva enables the Abaarso School to become more sustainable and serve bright, low-income students.

This loan will be used to fund a student's tuition for half of the 2012-2013 school year at the Abaarso School. While the school year has recently ended, the family agreed to take out this loan at the start of the year, and unforeseen administrative delays ended up prohibiting the Abaarso School from posting this loan for funding on the Kiva site until now. In other words, this partner pre-disbursed this tuition loan with the hope that Kiva lenders would support it once they took the administrative steps needed to post it to Kiva.

While this delayed fundraising represents a departure from Kiva?s standard policy of requiring loans to be posted to the Kiva website within one month of the disbursement date, we decided these loans merit an exception given immense challenges that this partner has faced in setting up a loan program in one of the poorest and most remote places on earth. While originally this loan was to be funded soon after this student started this school term, unexpected delays prohibited the Abaarso School from doing so. These delays were out of the school's control and included waiting for an updated registration from the central authorities of Somaliland, convening parents and families of the students - many of whom are nomadic - to agree to the loan terms, and generally doing business in an extremely challenging environment. This Kiva loan will be used to provide borrowers with needed goods or services, as opposed to cash or financial credit. Please note, this loan represents an exceptionally high risk to Kiva lenders. The repayment capacity of this student's family is very unknown. By lending to this family you are exposing yourself to potentially much higher default rates than typical Kiva loans, and you may not be repaid due to the family?s inability to repay, institutional risk, or macroeconomic factors such as funds being tied up in Somalia.