Mary Elizabeth Alejandro Maza received a loan of just over £1000 a couple of months ago and has recently started making repayments. She runs a shop and used the money to buy stock including cooking oil, sugar, rice, pasta and soft drinks - these are items she sells most. She set up the shop relatively recently and she is still growing, over time she intends to build up the variety of products she sells. She expects to make a greater level of profit in the future. One of the main reasons she set up the shop was because it allows her to work from home - it is much easier to look after her children this way. She is helped from time to time in the shop by her mother and her husband Carlos Ricardo who works as a builder. The shop also fulfills an important social purpose as the local community has somewhere to buy basic foods and household items, otherwise they would face a longer journey into town. Mary even allows regular customers to take items on credit and they pay at the end of the month. She has also started offering mobile phone top-ups as almost everyone has a mobile phone now. Mary reckons that her monthly profit is around $200.