Kiva Stories from the Field

I’m going to make a bold statement: microfinance is the land of minute incremental change, and joy resulting from massive professional achievement is rare here.  Afterall, one loan of $125 does not take a family from impoverished to middle-class, and three months in the field does not illuminate the solution to eradicating global poverty.  As a result, any goal achieved feels like an immense victory, and yesterday, victory was mine.

Several weeks ago I spent three weeks traveling north to train 7 of BRAC Tanzania’s branches on how to implement Kiva (for a synopsis, see summaries, part 1 and part 2). Yesterday, I finally saw the fruits of my labor. Allow me to give you some background:

BRAC Tanzania has more than 65 branches throughout the country, and that number is constantly growing. Right now, only a handful of those branches actually “do” Kiva. What that means is that only a select number of the branches have been trained on what Kiva is and how to produce the business profiles that are found on the Kiva website. When I travelled to 7 of the branches in September, I did so to train the Community Organizers and Branch Managers at those branches so that they could begin to produce Kiva business profiles. The goal was that after I left, they would be self-sufficient in the Kiva process and able to complete business profile templates with their groups and take the accompanying photo.  An added bonus would be if the pictures were interesting and the forms contained more detail.

For those of you unfamiliar with BRAC on Kiva, a picture like this has been the norm:

Typcal BRAC Kiva Business Profile Picture

In addition, the descriptions are historically brief and lacking in colorful details.  After arriving here I realized there’s very good reason for that: BRAC has more than 100,000 clients throughout the country, and more than 2,300 groups on Kiva.  The staff is extremely busy and has a lot of paper work to fill out, of which the Kiva Business Profile Template is just one piece.  When I first arrived here, I spent quite a bit of time ascertaining how l could create a template that produced more interesting profiles for Kiva lenders without demanding more time from the BRAC staff.

What I came up with were a few multiple choice questions and a bit of clarification on existing questions.  I tested the forms in the field to see where the staff got confused (the forms are in English but the level of English spoken by each CO varies), which questions clients had difficulty answering (for example, listing the ages of their children is no easy task), and which blanks were likely to be filled by something generic (i.e. the loan will be used “to expand her business”).  I revised the BRAC-Kiva template based on all of these observations, and I still consider it a work in progress.

Waiting to receive the first batch of profiles from the branches I trained has been like waiting to receive exam results; I was dying to know how I’d done.  To see their finished forms and photos would be my only guage of success or failure.  Yesterday, my waiting finally came to an end as I received profiles from 2 of the 7 branches.  The elation I felt at seeing pictures like this made those three weeks on the road fully worthwhile:

A new-and-improved Kiva Business Profile picture from BRAC Tanzania

Look at the depth, color, and action!

As I hurriedly looked over the forms they completed I was happy to see very few questions left blank (possible if the staff forgets what the question means) and a lot of great, thorough information.  I left the office eagerly looking forward to coming in this morning to begin adding them to the Kiva website.

Unfortunately, the pictures above will never make it to the Kiva website.  What I viewed as a major professional accomplishment turned into a disappointment as I made a frustrating discovery: many of the pictures were not correctly matched with their accompanying form.  During training I tried to convey to the branch offices how important it was that we know which picture goes with which form, but it remained a difficult task.  I explained how to find the picture number on the camera and there were nods of understanding all around, and even demonstrated understanding as I stepped back and watched the staff complete the Kiva process on their own.  But alas, I now have brilliant photos and thorough templates that will never see the light of day.

For an evening, I thought victory was mine, but it seems I did miss something afterall.  This is not a fatal error nor is it irreconcilable.  After a few hours of trying to make sense of the picture numbers, I admitted that I’d have to chalk these ones up to a loss.  I got on the phone with the branch and tried to re-explain the picture number concept, and this time I think I got some traction.  Happily, not every business profile had this issue and I’m hopeful that the next batch I receive will not have this same problem.  To see if my optimism paid off, check out Kiva’s currently fundraising BRAC Tanzania loans.  Now, if I could just find out what happened at those other five branches . . .