Author Archive
Connecting KF7 with KF8
Training week for the 8th class of Kiva Fellows (KF8) is wrapping up our fifth and final day. We have another remarkable class of 27 people who will soon be heading to 18 different countries to work with Kiva’s MFI field partners.
This morning I got word that a couple of KF7′s were collaborating on a response to this new class of fellows and we made sure that the KF8 trainees watched each hilarious video.
KF8 viewing Brett Dobb's video from Kenya
Unfortunately, the camera was unable to capture the roars of laughter to “ostrich” “technological devices” “replaced” “tweeted – great looking group”.
KF8 also watching Nick Cain's video from Paraguay
Kiva is all about connecting people. Thanks Brett and Nick for connecting via video with our trainees in San Francisco. Well done KF7 and good luck KF8!
First Quarter 2009 Review
The first quarter of 2009 has seen many amazing stories from Kiva Fellows in the field. Let’s take a look back at some of the remarkable blog posts you may have missed!
Top 5 most viewed blog entries:
With almost 6000 views, Kieran Ball takes the internet community by storm with his post featuring a phenomenal video tracking a loan from London to Cambodia. You can also view the translated Spanish and French versions of the video here: Un Punado de Dolares/ Une Poignee de Dollars.
- Fistful of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan by Kieran Ball (Cambodia-Indonesia)
- Kiva Fellows: News from Cambodia by Kieran Ball (Cambodia-Indonesia)
- Microfinance in the Air by Nicholas Roose (Indonesia)
- Used Clothing Sales in Northern Mexico by Megan McTiernan (Mexico)
- Bluefields, Nicaragua by Megan Montgomery (Nicaragua)
It has been an exciting first quarter as a new group of Kiva Fellows left for the field, some existing fellows transitioned to new placements and others returned home after a life changing experience abroad. The theme of this Kiva Fellows blog review is transition.
Kristy and Andrea shared about beginnings of their fellowship in Cameroon and Guatemala. As you may know, Kiva Fellows commit to 10-12 weeks to their placement, but some commit to be a Kiva Fellow for 6-12 months and have multiple MFI placements. Rob discussed his transition from Tajikistan to the Philippines. While Kieran, John, and Teresa survived a lightening strike on their airplane from Cambodia to the Philippines as well as a feisty raccoon (#2 blog). Julie has been a Kiva Fellow for over ten months and wrote a winsome reflection about her “fellow fellows”. Recently, Cory posted an email conversation thread between active Kiva Fellows with their candid insights into microfinance. Our first Kiva Fellow in Benin, Sarah Lawson, shared some closing thoughts on her fellowship.
Along with transitions we have seen lots of great video content including video journals and borrower profiles. Below is a list of some video blog entries:
- Nathan and Bernice showed us how to walk through a rice farm
- Stephanie’s thoughts on microfinance interest rates from the back of a motorcycle
- Liz shared a clip from a monthly group meeting in Senegal
- Emily asks “are you my entrepreneur” in Peru
- Jessica explains a “solidarity group” in Mali
- Maya shows a MFI branch office in Nicaragua
- Bernice conducted training in Vietnam
- Sam revealed the celebration after the presidential election in El Salvador
- Sierra and Diana each summarized a day of visiting borrowers
That brings us to the end of our first Kiva Fellows blog summary for Q1 2009. The content that Kiva Fellows have provided for the blog is impressive, so we decided to highlight a few of the pieces from the last three months.
Did you enjoy this blog summary? Please vote in the survey below:
KF7 New Lender Challenge
Back at Kiva HQ, KF7 has made it to the the forth of five days of training. Tonight we are having the first “New Lender Challenge”. Teams have been divided up from Kiva staff and KF7 and the team with the most successful invites by tomorrow wins a huge prize. Please encourage your friends/family/contacts to register on Kiva tonight!
Register here:
https://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=register
Referred by a friend? (PLEASE ADD)
team3@fellows.kiva.org
Team 3 Members: Jessica, Brett, Jeff, Drew, JD, Brent & Nathan
Other good choices include team 1 (team1@fellows.kiva.org) and team 2 (team2@fellows.kiva.org)
- Team 1 Members
The challenge ends tomorrow morning so sign up SOON!
Micro-finance in Post-Conflict: Meet OI-Wedco
It has been sometime since I’ve updated for the Kiva Fellows blog. As cliché as it is lots has happened and I’ve promised a more in depth description of the impact of the post-election crisis on micro-finance. So in baseball terminology I offer a double header (or double-dip in the vernacular of the dugout). I wanted to separate the entries. This one is about my field partner. Below is an entry more specific to the violence and its impact on three remarkable women.
I’ve been in Africa for two months and I thought I’d finally share more about my field partner, Opportunity International-Wedco. As a fellow you are caught working for two organizations simultaneously, although the missions typically align there are still interesting challenges when the organizations differ. Thankfully it hasn’t happened too much.
OI-Wedco's Main Office
Over the last several weeks I’ve been primarily working from the OI-Wedco headquarters office on the outskirts of Kisumu. My main contact has been Kimberly, an American who has been working here for nearly two years. She is a regular renaissance woman around here. Kim has been managing partner/donor relationships, consultants, hiring/firing, training new staff, among other things. I arrived into an extreme busy and tense time due to a confluence of internal and external issues. The external issues have been from the lingering impact of the post-election crisis (you can read my summary below). The internal issues include primarily HR problems. Staffing qualified positions, especially loan officers can be extremely challenging even though the unemployment rate in Kenya is around 40-50%. Due to limits of education and resources, the pool of qualified candidates is small and elusive. When I first arrived they conducted 50 interviews in a few days, so, they didn’t have much time to sit me down for conversations and training about OI-Wedco etc. Instead, I learned as I went along and jumped into preparing my travels to visit clients and sorted out the repayment sheet for their groups posted to Kiva (which hadn’t been submitted for months). Much of OI-Wedco I learned on my own and from brief casual conversations with the staff. Opportunity International is a large international organization that conducts micro-finance operations in 28 countries. They acquired WEDCO (Women’s Economic Development, something, something…they love acronyms in Africa), which was a small struggling Kenya MFI in 2006 and a few weeks they acquired another MFI based in the central province around Nairobi (which has made things interesting). Opportunity International’s growth philosophy seems to be one that doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel. Instead they find local MFI’s that at the core have strong potential, but need adjustments structure and strategy. OI doesn’t seem to start MFI’s from scratch, but instead “adopts” and integrates them into their network.
At OI-Wedco, constant visitors come in and out. Most are consultants or staff from headquarters in the US, UK or elsewhere. I’ve met dozens as they visit for a week or so and leave. It makes for some interesting conversation and every day different. Ultimately, I’ve been inspired by the social and holistic mission of OI and many of the staff have beautifully expressed to me how they get purpose in working to assist their fellow Kenyans (they could be getting paid better working elsewhere).
The main product OI-Wedco offers is a group loan with a minimum of 15 people (self-help groups or trust groups). When a new group forms they get a collective bank account and apply for legal status from the local government (all together costs the group around $25). For new groups OI-Wedco loan officers offer a 5-7 week training course in various business/finance topics relevant for micro-enterprise. If a client goes clears three loans with a strong payment history they can graduate to an individual loan. That is micro-finance in action. It should provide social mobility that enables people to take incremental steps out of poverty and in this case towards more robust financial services. This group dynamic provides efficiency for OI-Wedco, while providing legitimate collateral and support for the clients. I’ve been amazed at the diversity of backgrounds and incomes for OI-Wedco clients. As you can probably tell if you have explored Kiva, most of the clients listed for funding are individuals. They do, however, have several MFI’s like OI-Wedco that work with on groups (learn more).
I found it interesting that their best clients generally come from rural villages. In order to reach out to many parts of Western Kenya they currently have five branch offices in the towns of Busia, Bungoma, Eldoret, Kisii, and Kisumu (more will expanded soon) and several one room offices in smaller towns. Having the rural areas as the stronger clients does cause problems for costs in transportation and maintaining several branch locations, but the stability, repayment, as well as mission proves its value (plus it is fun riding on the back of an OI motobike). One branch manager told me that he wished all his groups were in rural areas, if so his portfolio would have a tiny PAR (percentage at risk, the primary yardstick of micro-finance stability). He tells me that this is because the rural areas tend to have strong community ties and more responsible/mature members. His main groups with issues are in the urban areas. This he tells me, is because those groups tend to be younger, less experienced, more distractions, and less commonalities tying them to the group.
Riding Shotgun in a Matatu
The timing of the partnership is both interesting and tragic. Kiva and OI-Wedco officially became partners in early December 2007, weeks before the presidential election that sent Kenya into a whirlwind of violence, economic pause, inflation, tension, and the death of 1,500 people. I’ve met with a few clients that received their loan days before the election and used a good portion of the capital to buy stock, which many lost through looting or arson during the turmoil.
After the post-election crisis, Kiva sought to help OI-Wedco in any way. The plan was to post group loans on Kiva that were being rescheduled by OI-Wedco due to the impact of the crisis on client groups. Kiva’s policy is that a new business posted for funding must be within thirty days of the loan disbursement. Because the loans of OI-Wedco groups were only being rescheduled, not re-loaned or “topped up” as the clients like to call it, Kiva made an exception due the extraordinary challenges of the crisis.
Nevertheless, it made things messy and confusing to sort out afterwards, as I’ve been sifting through the repayment data, amounts disbursed, dates disbursed, loan terms, etc. Which made for a maddening time of reconciling the repayments schedule (my eyes are permanently cross-eyed). I discovered some of the reasons for the glitches and have been able to stabilize and I am working on getting a better system going.
Anyway, I thank you for reading this scattered and I’m guessing at some points confusing entry. All in all I am finding my fellowship to be more challenging than I thought it would be, yet more worthwhile than I ever imagined.
Brief Summary of the Post-Election Crisis in Kenya
The last several weeks I’ve been traveling all over West Kenya visiting groups in the branch offices of OI-Wedco to do journal updates. I return back to Kisumu with a deeply somber heart.
A few weeks ago in Kakemega I met two Kikuyu single mothers from a Kiva funded group. They told me about how they lost everything after the post-election violence. During the turmoil their shop and clothing stock was burned because of their tribal background. They fled to an IDP (internally displaced persons, essentially refugees in their own country) camp run by the UN and stayed for five months. They left the camp because of its awful conditions, and now sell cloths for a vendor and make a measly fifty schillings a day (less than a dollar).
An IDP camp in Kenya
Another woman that I met was Agripina. She is also a member of a Kiva funded group. As a result of the violence she lost everything she owned, her vehicle, house, salon, and car were all burned the evening of December 28th when Mwai Kibaki was officially announced winner of the presidential election. Agripina was a victim of the violence even though she is Luhya (the majority tribe in Kakamega) because she is married to a Kikuyu man. They fled far away to an IDP camp in Nakuru. All of this happened when she was six months pregnant and thankfully she gave birth to her first child, a healthy baby boy on March 11th inside the camp.
What could I say? What could I do?
These weren’t sob stories played up to solicit a handout as touts falsely do on the streets of Nairobi and Kisumu. These were the raw, compelling, and honest stories of the impact of the foolish chaos of the post-election crisis upon three specific women.
I’d like to do my best to explain the post-election crisis in Kenya.
*****Summary
Leading up to the presidential election held in Kenya on December 27, 2007. Several candidates were on the ballot, but the country knew that it would come down to two candidates that would battle for the presidency (much like a particular countries two party system).
Incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, and his former political ally, Raila Odinga, were the two primary challengers. Kibaki is part of the largest tribe in Kenya, the Kikuyu’s, who have had most of political power since independence and the majority live in central Kenya. Of the three presidents in Kenya’s history two have been Kikuyu’s and are notorious for preferential favoritism by giving influential political posts to other Kikuyu’s despite experience or ability.
Raila Odinga is a Luo, which is the third largest tribe in Kenya and most in his tribe live in Western Kenya (where I am based). During his campaign he rallied other tribes under his constituency in opposition to the Kibaki and the Kikuyu’s. It is disappointing that modern democracies in the developing world don’t uniting people to a political party by issues and platforms and instead resort to an easier leverage of tribal background and thus vehemently divide the electorate.
The day after the election as votes were being counted, (media coverage is as rapid as American cable news) Odinga had a significant lead and his party prematurely claimed victory, as the day progressed a swift and suspicious swing in vote tabulations showed Kibaki closing the gap and eventually winning the election.
On December 30th the other tribes grew discontent of the corrupt favoritism and alleged/assumed vote rigging, and there was widespread discontent. The perpetual marginalization spurred a rage of Luo’s and other tribes attacking Kikuyu’s and their establishments in the west while Kikuyu’s responded with attacks against Luo’s and others in the central province. Gangs and militias became small armies and neighborhoods and villages became the battlegrounds. Police and soldiers were sent in to create peace, but they are also accused of attacking innocent people. (I met a member of Kiva funded group who showed me a scar near his ankle from a bullet during the violence)
The violence was a tragic mess that left 1500 people dead, 250,000 people displaced (estimates), millions of dollars of damages to residences, businesses, and goods, and resulted in a period of zero economic activity that impacted every Kenyan as well as landlocked East African nations that rely on transporting their goods through Kenya. I met a recently hired loan officer last week who told me his story. He is a Luo from the Kisumu area, who went to college in Nairobi and got a job working for a start up telecommunications company. For the last few years he poured his life into building the company and his family, the day after the election, the entire companies headquarters were set ablaze (the founder is Kikuyu). They lost millions of dollars of equipment, but most importantly they lost the company and place of work for many people. He was bitter and angry towards the reckless thoughtlessness of the violence, they attacked the business without acknowledging that Luo’s worked there too.
It is important to remember that this crisis isn’t as simple as categorizing a group as bad and good, innocent or guilty, right or wrong. Each side has those that are to blame and each side has those that were innocent victims. Up to this year Kenya had been held as an exemplary developing African state, yet the violence revealed that tribalism still runs deep and that generalizations and hostilities had been on edge for years.
It was devastating and destructive chaos and an absolute miracle that Kofi Annan was able to negotiate a peace by creating a grand coalition government, perhaps the greatest legacy of one of the world’s great statesman. Many international observers were concerned that the crisis could have scaled to match the genocide of Rwanda in the mid-nineties.
After the coalition government was brokered on February 28th the violence stopped. Order was restored and people went back to rebuilding their lives.
*****
After my time in Kakamega, I could do nothing but think about the dark, poignant eyes of Grace, Anne, and Agripina. The pain and loss that they suffered is beyond anything I’ll ever be able to fully comprehend.
My heart is feels like lead, it is heavy seeing how we humans can still resort to the most unimaginative answer to our problems with violence.
It leaves me with the simple question of HOW? How could this happen?
Lack of hope is my best answer and may be too simple.
Nevertheless, it is hopelessness that can lead to desperation of doing unthinkable things.
Hopelessness is what fueled the post-election violence in Kenya because people saw no other hope towards the injustices of an illegitimate corrupt government and it is hopelessness that perpetuates some of the greatest ills in our world.
Grace, Anne, and Agripina have every reason to be hopeless, yet with bold courage continue on with the belief in making something better for themselves and for their children.
Kiva doesn’t only distrubute loans to the poor…Kiva distributes hope.
My crazy boda-boda adventure
This past week Opportunity International-Wedco was able to finally report its loan repayments on Kiva and to its lenders (after pausing during the post-election crisis). Now I can jump into coordinating visits to do journal updates. Special thanks to the sick excel skills of my MPM, Ben Elberger.
I wanted to share a quick funny story from my travels. Many of the fellows have mentioned the various forms of transportation that we get to take around our locations. In Kenya, matatu, tuk-tuk, and boda-boda’s are the transportation staples. Last week I was heading home after leaving Kenya’s own version of Wall-Mart, Nakumatt. I took a boda-boda because I had loaded up with a couple gallons of water.
As we were going I noticed that my boda-boda driver was sweating, a lot. I’m not talking about the light sweat from a warm day, I’m talking about the kinda sweat you’d see glowing fiery red or neon green in a Gatorade commercial. While sitting behind him on the bicycle I couldn’t help but focus on the sweat droplets form around his ear lobe and I got a bit worried when I imagined it slowly flying back into my eye. So I asked him if he was feeling sick. He replied “I don’t feel so good”. Sure enough right after he uttered the last syllable the collection of droplets on his ear flew back and was aimed to hit right between my eyes. Quickly I ducked my head causing my bag with a big water jug to fall to the side of the bike throwing off the balance of the boda-boda and rubbing against the rusty spokes of the wheel. He hit the brakes yelling something unmentionable in Luo while I stuck out both my feet and thankfully we safely stopped. It was a close call and I’ll make sure to not bring large full water jugs with me the next time I take a boda-boda and make sure my driver isn’t under the weather.
Well that is my quick story, although it is nothing to the stories Nabomita could share. Also, I promise that after some comprehensive time in the field my next post will be more substantive regarding the post-election violence in Kenya and its impact upon Kiva funded businesses.
Karibu to Kisumu
I have made it safe and on time to my destination in Kisumu, Kenya. It has been a rush. Before I left, Dr. Omedi Ochieng, told me that nothing could prepared me to fully understand what Africa would be. Personal descriptions, books, photos, data, only go so far Prior to my departure I believed that I had a cerebral understanding of what Africa would be like, but being here the visceral experience is daunting.
My head is slowly catching up and as I look around I know that Kiva and micro-finance have a pivotal role to play. It has helped me to check my emotions knowing that we are doing something about it. Because I lack the ability to fully articulate Africa I want to share with you someone who can:
“Africa is nothing if not evocative. It’s a place of such unimaginable beauty and dignity and expanse and possibility, and such unfathomable suffering and despair and disease and decay. It is at once so alive and so wracked by death, so powerful in its landscape and physicality, and so powerless under the weight of famine and political upheaval and disease” well said Shauna Niequist.
Friday morning I hopped on a Kakemba bus to Kisumu. The bus ride took eight grueling hours but looking out my window provided more than enough fascinating sights to make the time pass. We went through rolling green hills, up the famous Rift Valley, I saw village after village (my favorite was Kericho with thousands of acres of tea leaves), cows and donkeys and sheep grazing in the grass, African’s meandering down the road, even a heard of zebras.
One of the sobering parts of the bus ride was at a stop in Nakuru. Every couple hours the bus would stop at an Akamba station so people could buy snacks and drinks, as well as use the rest room. My heart sank when I walked towards the main road and saw something that I’d read about, cement walls with broken glass bottles on the top. The wall in the photo is surrounding a home, and it illustrates the divisions and barriers that have been scattered throughout African history and continue
today.
Currently, life is still challenging. The political turmoil after the presidential election had much of the violence in Western Kenya which largely included Kisumu. There are still buildings that are destroyed from the looting and arson. Please read this article for a summary. The violence caused Kiva’s Kenya partners to pause because of the unrest. Now that peace has been brokered through a power sharing coalition it is business as usual and the MFI’s are able to operate. Nevertheless, things are still fragile. Kenyans love to talk about Barack Obama (his father was born and raised near Kisumu) but the tone changes when speaking about Kenyan politics.
I’m anxious to get started working for my assigned field partner, Opportunity International-Wedco. I begin on Monday with much work to be done.
Kwa heri!
