Author Archive
A Good Way to Handle Meeting Latecomers
By Steve Grey, KF11, Kenya
… it was one of the meeting management techniques that intrigued me. At the beginning of the 4-hour session (with no break!), the leader asked the 100+ attendees to come up with rules for the meeting… fines for cell phone use, fines for leaving the meeting, and fines for arriving late… You might be wondering, “What do they do with the fines?”. Well that’s one of the more interesting parts of this system…
Meeting Kiva Borrowers in Kitengela, Kenya (3.5 minute video)
By Steve Grey, KF11, Kenya
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGUTs8H-jEg]In this 3.5 minute video, see what it’s like to spend the day with a loan officer from one of Kiva’s lending partners. Hanifa Seme (Credit Officer with Small and Micro Enterprise Programme in Kenya) and Steve Grey (Kiva Fellow) walk “The Pipeline”, a densely populated urban area in Kitengela just outside Nairobi, Kenya. They meet with 9 potential Kiva borrowers to get the information for their Kiva website profiles.
Life and Death in Rongo, Kenya
By Steve Grey, KF11, Kenya
“One of the borrowers on this list, Helida Ochieng, passed away last month.”
Those words hit me like a punch in the stomach. I was in Kisumu on the shores of Lake Victoria to work with Kisumu Medical & Education Trust (K-MET), one of Kiva’s lending partners in Kenya.
My assignment was to do “borrower verification” – visit 10 randomly selected K-MET borrowers who have received Kiva loans and verify that the information posted on Kiva’s website is accurate (name, loan use, loan amount and term, etc.). But now what? I felt like I was on shaky ground. Was there a way to honor Helida’s memory and be sensitive to her family while also upholding Kiva’s value of transparency to its lenders?
How to Handle a Deadbeat
I got to see a fascinating situation last week in Nairobi when I was with Caroline, a local Credit Officer from SMEP (one of Kiva’s lending partners in Kenya). It was a classic microfinance scenario: What happens when a member of a borrower group doesn’t pay? But it wasn’t theoretical anymore… it was happening right in front of me.
Why am I going to Kenya?
Since we spent most of our time volunteering in developing countries, we saw a lot of poverty. From favelas in Brazil to slum settlements in South Africa to beggars in Calcutta to subsistence farmers in rural areas (including Kenya) poverty was pervasive… but it wasn’t hopeless. In the midst of poverty, we met some inspiring people… Why am I going to Kenya as a Kiva Fellow? I’m going for three reasons…
