Author Archive
Liberia: Tryin’ Small
Liberia is tryin’ small. This common expression can be heard everywhere here: it means “I’m okay” or “I’m getting by” and is the equivalent of how many Americans reflexively answer “Fine” to the greeting “How are you?” But many in Liberia are tryin’ larger, thanks to microfinance institutions, many of which have set up shop since 14 years of civil conflict ended in 2003.
D-Day in Liberia
In Liberia, D-Day is a regular occurrence. Disbursal Day, that is.
Microfinance is a key part of the post-conflict recovery, and LEAP, Kiva’s Liberian field partner, is at the forefront. LEAP (the Local Enterprise Assistance Program) is Liberia’s oldest continuously operating microfinance lender, and the largest by number of borrowers and amount lent.
Pissed Off Kiva Lenders
By John Briggs, KF8 Kenya
Update on sentiment shift: On June 23, Tom, the team captain for the (formerly) Pissed Off Kiva Lenders, changed the team name to Unhappy Kiva Lenders. Tom explained the name change in a posting on the team page: “I want the day to come soon when the team name will be ‘Delighted Again Kiva Lenders’ but the step above in the name change reflects current progress.”
Some Kiva lenders are pissed off about Kiva’s recent launch of loans to borrowers in the United States. Their angry cry has been heard in Kenya.
I arrived in Kenya two weeks ago to work with new Kiva field partner KADET. My marathon orientation-and-training tour is in full swing: this week I met dozens of KADET branch personnel in the western cities of Kisumu and Eldoret.
Successfully setting up Kiva-related operations poses many challenges for MFIs, but my new KADET colleagues made quick work of it. Both branches were able to post borrowers to Kiva on the same day they were introduced to it: Kisumu posted Maulyne’s loan and Eldoret posted Monicah’s loan.
Both loans were funded overnight, and the KADET staff was jubilant. At the Eldoret branch I joined KADET staff in poring over the Kiva lenders and lending teams who had supported Monicah. One lending team for Monicah’s loan jumped out at us: the Pissed Off Kiva Lenders.
Pissed off lenders? People at KADET were surprised. This wasn’t in the Kiva orientation I’d given them. Stephen Makanga, KADET’s integration and donor relations manager, and I decided to open the Pissed Off Kiva Lenders team page to find out more.
Image from the Pissed Off Kiva Lenders' team page
A statement on the page announced, “Kiva’s stated mission is to ‘alleviate poverty’. Poverty is defined as: ‘the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions’. Does that sound more like the situation for US Kiva borrowers or borrowers from the Third World countries?”
Stephen gave the page an incredulous stare and kept reading.
Upending microcredit: Cambodians use Kiva to lend to U.S. borrowers
This Wednesday marked a watershed moment for Kiva.org: borrowers from the U.S. made a well-publicized debut on the person-to-person microlending website. It left no doubt that microcredit, seen by many as the province of the poor, had arrived to serve Americans in need.
The floodgates are open, and they sluice both ways.
Kiva’s launch of lending in the U.S. has impassioned many, including a group of people in Cambodia near and dear to me — the staff of Maxima Mikroheranvatho, a Kiva partner microfinance institution where I was a Kiva Fellow from October 2008 to February 2009.
As Kiva ambassador-in-the-trenches at Maxima, one of the things I’d tried to impress upon them was the satisfaction I get out of being a Kiva lender. So when my posting at Maxima ended earlier this year, I’d settled on the perfect gift to help them understand this: a Kiva gift certificate.
Over our farewell dinner in Phnom Penh, I pulled out a printout of the Kiva gift certificate page and presented it to the senior managers at Maxima. As they’re in the business of microlending, minor disbelief ensued. Kiva!? Who would they lend to? When I told them that Kiva was considering launching in the U.S., excitement erupted.
Two’s company, Kiva’s a crowd
Kiva is a crowdsourcer.
Crowds of lenders are the source of funds for Kiva borrowers. A very recent milestone quietly appeared on the Kiva statistics page — over half a million lenders have funded borrower loans on the Kiva website. That’s one big crowd!
There’s also a crowd of volunteers and avid Kiva boosters: hundreds of volunteer editors and translators, dozens of Kiva Fellows in the field, umpteen heroic souls who volunteer at Kiva headquarters in San Francisco, and the nearly five-thousand-strong group of Kiva Friends, the best compadres ever.
It’s good company to keep. Much of our interaction is in, and uniquely facilitated by, the electronic ether (the Internets, a series of tubes). Face-to-face meetings may never occur, but can be a cause for celebration when they do.
A Handsome Gentleman Came Calling
What do you get when you cross a woman named Matilde Tamon and an organization like Ahon Sa Hirap, Inc. (ASHI)? A love song.
Matilde, who is a spry 75 years of age, has been a member of ASHI for 13 years. She loves to sing, and also loves what ASHI has done for her and the women in her community. Faced with this fortunate predicament, she did what any Filipino would do: she sang about it.
Some years ago Matilde composed a song of gratitude for ASHI, one which she usually delivers a capella. ASHI, a Grameen-style, non-profit microcredit institution that provides financial and social services to its more than 22,000 Filipina members, has been operating in Antique Province, where Matilde lives, since 1996.
Matilde has charmed generations of ASHI personnel and members with her song and wit. Legend has it that she sings her song to any new visitors from ASHI when she first meets them, and legend didn’t disappoint on the day I met Matilde.
In late April, I visited her center hall in Malandog Barangay, Hamtic, along with members of ASHI’s board of trustees and other ASHI personnel. After everyone had eaten a particularly delicious meal prepared by ASHI members, Matilde stepped up and sang us her song.
Matilde sings in Kinaray-a, the language spoken by most people in Antique Province. The video is subtitled in English, thanks to ASHI staff from Antique who doubled as interpreters. Enjoy!
Some unfamiliar terms you may encounter in the video:
Field credit officers: ASHI development officers — personnel that visit ASHI members in the field.
Group: ASHI members form groups of five to build solidarity, and to guarantee each other’s loans.
Center: A number of groups — usually six — form a center. A centers is a small, freestanding structure built and maintained by the women who form its member groups. All business is transacted in weekly meetings at the center.
Sir Jesse: The first field credit officer assigned to Matilde’s center; Jesse is now in charge of Grameen operations for ASHI, and is based in Manila. Jesse is the handsome gentleman in Matilde’s song.
Ma’am Hermie: The ASHI first regional manager for Antique Province, who oversaw operations at the time Jesse was a field credit officer.
John Briggs is a Kiva Fellow serving with Ahon Sa Hirap, Inc. (ASHI) in the Philippines. This is his second of three placements. Before his post at ASHI, John worked with Maxima Mikroheranvatho in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. John’s third placement as a Kiva Fellow will be with the Kenya Agency for the Development of Enterprise and Technology (KADET), starting in June. If you haven’t already, consider becoming a Kiva Fellow, too!
Kiva in Cambodia: The Comic Book
I’m a new Kiva Fellow volunteering with Maxima, a microfinance institution (MFI) headquartered in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. I arrived in Phnom Penh about three weeks ago, and had the luxury of a week to acclimate before starting at Maxima.
My arrival coincided with a visit to Cambodia by Kiva co-founder Matt Flannery and Kiva Chief Software Architect Zvi Boshernitzan, who were making a field visit to see how Kiva works in the field for partner MFIs and for Kiva borrowers. I went straight from the airport to a dinner at a Phnom Penh restaurant with Matt, Zvi, and other Kiva Fellows serving in Cambodia.
(And what does a new arrival to Cambodia eat, fresh off the plane? Tarantula. Deep-fried, with a side of minty dipping sauce. Tarantula is among the edible insects not uncommon in Cambodia. I’d say it has a nutty flavor, but I’m sure the others who ate it that night have a different opinion.)
During their visit, Matt and Zvi paid visits to all four of the MFIs that Kiva partners in Cambodia. Maxima became a Kiva partner in May of 2007, and is the smallest of the four Kiva partner MFIs in Cambodia. I got to accompany Matt and Zvi on their visit to Maxima, which involved a stop at headquarters, and a trip out to the field to meet Maxima borrowers that were funded through Kiva.
For me, it was a fantastic orientation, an orientation that Kiva Fellows are rarely afforded when they land at an MFI. I took a lot of photos the day of our visit, and once I got back home I found a program on my Mac I didn’t know I had — Plasq’s photo “comic book” generator. I spent a few hours playing around with it, and realized it would be a great way to tell the story of our day visit with Maxima. After a day or two (or three?) or working on it, I finished Kiva in Cambodia, a nine-page photo comic.
Once I’d finished, I was excited. I showed it to Maxima staff, and they liked it (or at least that’s what they told me). I wanted to post it to this blog weeks ago, but ran into a problem shared by almost all Kiva Fellows working in the developing world: limited Internet access. The photo comic isn’t big by broadband standards in the U.S., but in Cambodia, it’s a small giant.
More often than not it can be a huge challenge to upload or download things when connectivity is spotty, dead slow, or both. For anything Internet-related, Murphy’s Law is a constant here: everything goes wrong. (Kudos to all Kiva Fellows who have posted video from the field — you are patient, persevering people!)
In a bind, I turned to Kiva Friends, a diehard group of Kiva supporters. I posted a message on their site asking for Web hosting help with Kiva in Cambodia and my plea was answered by one Fred Isler from Virginia. Fred (of 579 loans, and counting, to Kiva entrepreneurs) graciously agreed to host the comic on his personal site.
Thanks to Fred, I present to you… Kiva in Cambodia, the comic. Click on the image below to view it at Fred’s web site, or click here. Let me know what you think!
Kiva in Cambodia
Wiki watching: Power to the Bottom
I’m here at Kiva HQ, training as part of KF6, or Kiva fellows class 6. Short take: there is an amazing amount to learn before we go into the field, and these Kiva people — staff, volunteers — are amazing.
We’re learning about Kiva, the organization, how it came to be and where it’s going. We’ve been taught more about microfinance, and how Kiva partners with and works to strengthen the institutions in the field that actually do the lending. We’re getting a crash course in the technologies that help make this all happen. And we’re finding a little time for social activities, sharing stories, and getting to know each other. Kiva is feeding us well. They even let us out for exercise once in a while.
I’ll be arriving in Cambodia for the start of my fellowship in mid-October. How to remember all that we’re learning this week? Fortunately, that series of tubes called the Internet provides some major assist.
You’ve probably heard of Wikipedia, the encylopedic mother of all brain dumps. Fellows have their own mini-version, a Kiva Fellows wiki that we can contribute to and learn from: travel advice, blogging tips, country profiles, forums with debates over interest rates, and more. Besides the Fellows’ wiki, there’s also Kivapedia, an all things Kiva wiki that anyone can use and help edit.
These wikis, and other Web 2.0 technologies, have been so useful that Newsweek even decided it would make good fodder for an article about how Kiva (among others) uses them to goose collaboration from a far-flung network of staff and volunteers. The article, Power to the Bottom, showcases Kiva’s own Dan Zuckerman, a Fellow who just returned from Tajikistan.
Conclusion: wikis are pretty cool. Off-topic: Will someone let me know when the Weeki Wachee wiki goes online?
Kiva volunteer Sarah Wan teaches KF6 Fellows the ways of the wiki
