Archive for November 5th, 2009
Verb rules and road duels
By Rob Packer, KF9 Kyrgyzstan
A less endearing road habit is driving in the country at night, where the gentleman’s etiquette of how to deal with oncoming traffic that I’m used to, has become an updated version of the staple of the 19th-century Russian novel, the duel.
Continue Reading 3 comments 5 November 2009
A Slice of the Pie
By Victoria Kabak, KF9, Nicaragua
Before I left for my placement as a Kiva Fellow in Nicaragua, I was browsing my microfinance institution’s web site, trying to see what I could learn from it and to familiarize myself with the organization, AFODENIC, a bit more. I clicked on a link in the left sidebar called “Fuentes de Financiamiento,” or “Sources of Funding.” After the page loaded, I realized that, subconsciously and perhaps naïvely, I had been expecting to see a particular logo we know so well, that comforting, familiar green logo, with its leafy K and its curvy A.
Instead, the large pie graph on the page was labeled with the unfamiliar, non-green, non-leafy logos of three other funders. The smallest piece of that pie provides AFODENIC with funding equivalent to 4 times the amount of its monthly limit on Kiva–the largest, 57.5 times AFODENIC’s monthly limit.
There are a few important points to note at the outset. First, I can’t vouch for how recent these numbers are. Second, because the limits on Kiva are monthly, an MFI can receives up to 12 times that amount of funding in a given year. In fact, when I looked at the numbers on AFODENIC’s partner page on Kiva, the dollar amount of loans that AFODENIC has funded through Kiva is more than what the institution has received from two of the three other funders that were on this web page. But in any case, Kiva wasn’t on the page and my first thought was, “I guess Kiva isn’t one of its biggest sources of funding.”
1 comment 5 November 2009
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