Author Archive
Explaining Kiva
By Alison Carlman, KF8, Kenya
“ It’s this place, on the computer… like a bulletin board… where people post stories…”
Explaining Kiva isn’t easy. It wasn’t easy for me to explain Kiva to my Mom, (no offense, Mom) – so imagine me trying to explain Kiva to a Kenyan farmer who’s never touched a computer and never even heard of “the internet.”
As lenders, some of us hope that Kiva borrowers daydream about us in the way that we daydream about them. After all – we feel this connection with people half a world away because we’ve read their story and seen their photo – and we’ve shared a part of ourselves with them – a portion of our income, and perhaps a photo or a peak into our lending philosophy.
But as a Kiva Fellow it was my experience that many times borrowers know very little about their lenders. There are several reasons for this. The first – as I have alluded to – is the sheer difficulty of explaining Kiva to someone who has never heard of the internet, and cannot imagine how someone from Canada could know who they are. There is a steep learning curve along the road to understanding Kiva. (Read Matt Flannery’s blog article about an encounter gone wrong in this regard).
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Kenya’s Post-Election Crisis Revisited.
By Alison Carlman, KF8, Kenya
Kenya’s post election violence is probably far from the minds of most people in the world. After all – the contested election and its ensuing rioting happened in late 2007, and that was years ago. (See Former Kiva Fellow Zack Turner’s blog post from 2008 here, describing the conflict.) Surely you’d think that people were recovering from the trauma and have moved on with their lives.
Yes and no.
In my first several weeks of borrower interviews, a few borrowers brought up the violence when asked I about their challenges. Many eyes even swelled up with tears as these Kenyans described what happened to their businesses and to their families in the aftermath.
Surprised by how close it all still felt to many of these people, I began to ask every borrower about the post-election violence and how it has affected their lives. They have remarkable stories. Peres Akinyi Mimba, for example, had a successful informal hardware business in 2007. “I had a big shop, I even had to transport things on lorries” she explained to me. But during the period of violence her shop was looted and she lost most of her goods were stolen. Now she is taking a loan out to help re-build her business back to where it was before – she currently just sells basic paints and nails, but she wants to sell a larger variety of hardware supplies.
Alison (right) interviewing Consolata (center), with help of K-MET translator, Debra (left)
Microentrepreneurs and Maxipads
By Alison Carlman, KF8, Kenya
Consider yourself warned: this blog talks about maxipads. There. I said it. Now please keep reading.
Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Girl Effect” campaign. The “Girl Effect” is a about investing in what Africans call the “girl child” and how that can affect a country’s development. According to The Girl Effect, an extra year in primary school statistically boosts girls’ future wages by 10% to 20%, and every additional year a girl spends in secondary school lifts her income by 15% to 25%. And you better believe that the size of a country’s economy is, in no small part, determined by the educational attainment and skill sets of its girls. For Kenya alone, if the 1.6 million teenage girls who drop out of school each year instead finished their secondary education, their incremental earning power would lift Kenya’s GDP by $27 billion over their lifetimes. Not to MENTION the impact it would have on the health and well-being of future families and children of these girls-turned-women.
But it’s not that easy just to “stay in school.” The girls I work with in Kisumu at K-MET’s Safe Space have dropped out of school, many because they became mothers during their teen years.
A Safe Space Member Working to Start a Tailoring Business
I’ve talked a little with these girls, and have learned some other things about why it is so difficult to stay in school. I learned that something as simple as “sanitary towels” (or maxipads -there, I said it again-) can make the difference whether or not girls miss 4 days of school each month and get hopelessly behind in their studies. These products are too expensive to purchase every month, and the alternative is to use unsafe materials (like chopped up pieces of mattresses or old newspapers) which cause infections, leading to more absenteeism.
Look – I realize that you didn’t check the Kiva blog to read about sanitary products. But aren’t you at least slightly incensed by the fact that the lack of these simple supplies keep girls and women from attending school, attending public meetings, or even operating their own businesses for 4 days every month?!
The One Thing
By Alison Carlman, KF8 – Kenya
As a graduate student of International Development at an African university, I wish that the answer was as simple as finding the “one thing” to alleviate poverty. For marketing purposes, NGOs and “experts” tell us that the answer is so simple, whether it’s access to clean water, economic liberalization, universal healthcare, education, modernization, or microfinance. But 50 years of “Development” in practice teaches us that it’s not so black and white.
Kiva will be the first to tell you: microfinance is not the solution to poverty. Provision of financial services is simply an important part of helping people improve their lives; microfinance is only a “tool” that can help people to meet a portion of their basic physical, social, psychological, and spiritual needs.
Alison at K-MET with Deborah, the Coordinator of the Food Security Program.
I’m working with Kisumu Medical & Education Trust (K-MET), a reproductive health organization in Kenya. One of the many services that K-MET provides is reproductive health education and life-skills training to at-risk young girls ages 10-24. These girls are often young mothers, survivors of rape and unsafe abortion, children of polygamous families, girls who had to drop out of school and work as prostitutes in order to meet theirs and their families’ basic needs.
A loan alone won’t solve these girls’ problems; they need counseling, support, marketable skills, food, daycare, education, encouragement, mentorship…. the list goes on.
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