Posts filed under 'Kenya'
Transparency: Not Just for Lenders
By Maia Pelleg, KF9, Kenya Agency for the Development of Enterprise and Technology (KADET)
This video was filmed in response to the following interaction I had with a borrower group outside of Nairobi, Kenya…
“Habari. Nina itwa Maia,” I practice saying as I walk into my first group meeting of the day. A KADET credit officer named Gachi,and I are visiting Kiva borrowers living in Kamae, a slum-like area filled with tin huts and roads littered with garbage and roaming animals. Almost all Kiva borrowers here lack formal education and exposure to English, and I wanted to make sure that I could at least introduce myself in their language. I take my seat on a long sturdy bench and face a group of 12 borrowers sitting in four straight rows before me. With perfect posture, the borrowers stare earnestly at Gachi, waiting for an explanation as to why a mzungu (white person) is joining their meeting.
A round of introductions begins, translated by Gachi, and I learn that the group’s name is Kihatu, meaning broom. When they hear their group name announced to me, every single borrower’s face breaks into a proud grin. Until now, the groups I have met have names that translate to English words like lion, opportunity, and faith. Puzzled by this self-designated title, I ask for insight into this choice. A willowy woman with a strong, clear voice responds and Gachi translates, “This is the first loan cycle for all of us in this group,” she says, “and each of us is looking to sweep away the problems of our past and the problems of luck. We are no longer going to depend on luck, but on ourselves.”
17 comments 13 November 2009
Big is beautiful in Kenya
by Rachel Brooks, KF9, Kenya
My favorite Kiva field partner before I started my fellowship was Kisimu Medical & Education Trust, here in Kenya. At K-MET, microfinance is a smaller part of a community-based health organization. They offer loans to providers (many of them volunteers) so that they can maintain or improve their clinics and services. And they have these wonderfully innovative programs to help women and improve reproductive health.
But as much as programs like these make me go weak at the knees, I’ve also really come around to loving what the scope and focus of a big MFI can offer. Big is beautiful.
Faulu's Director holds the BIG certificate
Faulu Kenya has more than 90 outlets across the country, over 1000 staff members, and a fairly large headquarters. They are laser-focussed on providing financial services to low-income people, with over 250,000 clients. They want to reach a million clients by 2011. (more…)
4 comments 10 November 2009
Microfinance for Beginners~
By Anne Hector, KF9 Kenya
When last I posted (http://tiny.cc/pl68v), I was preparing to plunge into Nairobi traffic with the redoubtable intern, Mary Chege, to visit the Kitengela branch to gather up loans and work with the lending officers on Kiva postings. (more…)
6 comments 26 October 2009
On The Road With Pastor Zach
by Rachel Brooks, KF9, Kenya
Faulu Kenya, where I recently began as a Fellow, has a full-time Kiva Coordinator, Zachary Muriithi. He’s a busy guy. He works long hours at Faulu, manages his several small farms, helps run a home for 24 orphans, and preaches on Sunday. He has old and new friends wherever we go and has become an active user of Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress.
Still, Pastor Zach was excited for our first big task: completing a borrower verification process. We randomly picked ten of Faulu’s Kiva borrowers for a mini-audit and then appeared unannounced at their businesses to confirm their profile details. We really might as well have dropped a bag of marbles onto a map of Nairobi because the ten businesses could not have been farther apart but it was worth it.
(more…)
7 comments 24 October 2009
My Microfinance Institution
By Anne Hector, KF9 Kenya
My microfinance institution is the Small and Micro Enterprise Programme of Kenya (SMEP) and it is located in Nairobi… not at the foot of the Ngong Hills, I have to admit, but it is very very near Ngong Road. (more…)
12 comments 13 October 2009
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).
(more…)
5 comments 28 August 2009
On Buoyancy
by Joel Carlman, KF8
As I enter the final week of my Kiva Fellowship here in Kisumu, Kenya, I find myself thinking about what my time here has taught me. Kenya is so different from any place that I’ve ever been. The smiles are brighter, the hand-shakes longer, and the hospitality warmer than just about anywhere.
I know that I’m doing microfinance, and that Kiva is about borrowing and lending. The terms, the accounts, the figures, and financials are so interesting to me, and that can sometimes seem like what it is all about. During my fellowship, I dove deep into microfinance, and it’s tempting to look at everything through an analytical lens. Even as a student of development, I always want to find the golden thread that leads you from problem to solution through the complicated fabric of global and local issues.
But, even more than borrowing and lending, Kiva is about connecting. It’s hard enough to connect to people of your own background, from your own hometown, and of your own color, tribe, or social status. How can we possibly connect to people so different from us? I don’t know if I can really answer that question, but I am inspired to tell of the ways in which I have connected to this place during my fellowship.
19 comments 24 August 2009
Anything but Routine…Microfinance in Nairobi’s slums
By Jaclyn Berfond, KF8 Kenya
After a month of going out, interviewing borrowers every day, life can start to feel rather routine. Yet, all I have to do is look around – really look around at the slums where I have been working – and I know that Faulu’s work here in Nairobi is anything but routine.
Many fellows before me have offered poignant descriptions of slums around the world. Yet, I felt that the impact of the informal settlements (as they are so politically-correctly called) on my perceptions of poverty, economic empowerment and microfinance, as well as the impact on Nairobi and Kenya as a whole, merited yet another word on the subject.
It is estimated that over half of Nairobi’s population – around 2 million people – live in the city’s numerous informal settlements. Nairobi’s largest slum, and probably most infamous, is Kibera, home to over 1 million people. My work through Faulu has largely centered on the smaller Mukuru settlements. My first day in the Kwa Njenga section of Mukuru slum – where an estimated 75,000 people live on 80 acres of land (and these are only the official numbers) – was an experience like none I’ve ever had before. Walking for what felt like miles among shacks made of corrugated iron, navigating piles of garbage waiting to be burned, jumping over streams of waste winding through the makeshift streets, inhaling the fumes from the cars that attempted to squeeze through the giant maze of stalls and people…it was the making of a nightmare. Yet, for millions of people, this is reality.
Titus, a Faulu client in Mukuru
5 comments 21 August 2009
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)
7 comments 14 August 2009
Kiva Fellows in DeNile
By Jaclyn Berfond, Laura Buhler, Alison Carlman, Joel Carlman and Cameron Morris
Last weekend the East African Kiva Fellows delegation descended upon the bustling streets of Kampala, Uganda and the banks of the Nile River for two days of intense knowledge transfer and mild revelry. We spent hours discussing the importance of data validity in performing operational cost analyses and tried to debunk the myth that OpenOffice does not properly save .csv files for uploading repayment information to PA2. We also had a little fun. We left Kampala feeling refreshed and full of ideas to take back to our MFIs.
Now it’s your turn. We are officially issuing a challenge to the other regions (LAC, Asia, Western Africa and Eastern Europe) to prove that you are as united and have as much regional spirit as the East Africans. Excuses will not be tolerated. As Kiva Fellows this is a challenge you should be ready to take on. We did it, so can you. We also made an amazing video documenting our adventure. Check it out!
Jaclyn, Laura, Alison, Joel and Cameron are Kiva Fellows spread out over the East African Region. To read more about their experiences and their MFIs click on their names above.
12 comments 3 August 2009
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