Posts filed under 'Nicaragua'
‘Tis Someone’s Season To Be Jolly
By Victoria Kabak, KF9, Nicaragua
As the holiday season fast approaches, I imagine many of you back at home are starting to make lists (checking them twice?) of presents or of people you’re going to buy presents for or even of presents you hope someone else gets you. It’s no secret that businesses in the United States – and in other countries – experience a significant uptick in sales in December.
But I’ve learned in the past few weeks that this phenomenon isn’t unique to the United States or to developed countries. Many of the borrowers I’ve met with recently have expressed to me that, even if business is a little slow right now, they’re optimistic for December since it tends to be their best month every year.
This got me thinking about seasonal changes and how different times of the year can impact the businesses of Kiva borrowers in distinct patterns. There are some obvious ways in which seasons and time impact their livelihoods. In addition to Christmastime, for example, those who work in agriculture are affected by when the harvest times for their crops are. Here in Nicaragua, working with Kiva’s field partner AFODENIC, I’ve recently learned from clients that tomato season ended just a few weeks ago and pitahaya season is coming to a close shortly.
However, there are several less obvious impacts that turning the calendar page has on microentrepreneurs’ work. These types of consequences – which are, of course, out of clients’ control – are not ones that had occurred to me before coming to Nicaragua. To share with you what I’ve learned, here are a couple of ways in which the time of year can have either a negative or a positive effect on borrowers and their businesses. (more…)
2 comments 19 November 2009
El Mercado Central: A Day Visiting Kiva Clients
By Meg Gray, KF9 Nicaragua
How to describe one of the markets in Nicaragua? It’s hard and there really isn’t anything like them in the States to compare to. When I visited the Mercado Central in Chinandega, a small city that serves as a supply hub for the farms surrounding it, the heat was stifling. A few aisles are well lit with a sprinkling of fluorescent bulbs, while others are dark and cave-like. At the same time, the whole building is bursting with colors, smells, and noises. Every aisle is packed with people and very few aisles are wide enough for more than two people to walk side by side. And did I mention it’s hot. Chinandega has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the hottest places in Nicaragua. My guidebook accurately describes it as feeling like a rotisserie chicken the moment you leave the AC behind. In the end I decided, it was too hard to describe my day visiting clients in the Mercado Central. I decided it would be more fun and easier to try to figure out my video editing software and give you guys a taste of what my day was like. So here goes my first attempt at making a video…
Meg Gray is currently a Kiva Fellow in Nicaragua, where she is working with Kiva’s field partner CEPRODEL. Support a loan to a CEPRODEL entrepreneur or introduce a friend to Kiva with a gift certificate.
6 comments 17 November 2009
US Embassy Alerts a.k.a. Things to Worry About
By Meg Gray, KF9 Nicaragua
It rained all weekend in Managua. It rained because of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Ida, which hit Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast on Thursday. You may have heard about Ida because your saw it on the news or read about it in the paper. Or maybe, like me, you learned about it via an alert from the US Embassy in Nicaragua. In my mind, Embassy Alerts are code for “things to start worrying about if you aren’t already.” Written in a calm, informative tone, the alerts are as alarming as they are pertinent. In my five weeks in Nicaragua, I have received alerts on three topics:
1. Tropical Storm (soon-to-be Hurricane) Ida
2. Mobs Attacking the US Embassy
3. Dengue Fever Outbreak
(more…)
8 comments 9 November 2009
A Slice of the Pie
By Victoria Kabak, KF9, Nicaragua
Before I left for my placement as a Kiva Fellow in Nicaragua, I was browsing my microfinance institution’s web site, trying to see what I could learn from it and to familiarize myself with the organization, AFODENIC, a bit more. I clicked on a link in the left sidebar called “Fuentes de Financiamiento,” or “Sources of Funding.” After the page loaded, I realized that, subconsciously and perhaps naïvely, I had been expecting to see a particular logo we know so well, that comforting, familiar green logo, with its leafy K and its curvy A.
Instead, the large pie graph on the page was labeled with the unfamiliar, non-green, non-leafy logos of three other funders. The smallest piece of that pie provides AFODENIC with funding equivalent to 4 times the amount of its monthly limit on Kiva–the largest, 57.5 times AFODENIC’s monthly limit.
There are a few important points to note at the outset. First, I can’t vouch for how recent these numbers are. Second, because the limits on Kiva are monthly, an MFI can receives up to 12 times that amount of funding in a given year. In fact, when I looked at the numbers on AFODENIC’s partner page on Kiva, the dollar amount of loans that AFODENIC has funded through Kiva is more than what the institution has received from two of the three other funders that were on this web page. But in any case, Kiva wasn’t on the page and my first thought was, “I guess Kiva isn’t one of its biggest sources of funding.”
1 comment 5 November 2009
Walking Lessons
By Kelly McKinnon, KF9 Leon Nicaragua
I fell off the sidewalk tonight. It was bound to happen.
The sidewalks here are raised and tiled and narrow. No extra room is allotted for lamp posts or stoops or two-way traffic, all must exist in no more than four feet dedicated to pedestrian passages.
The rules to walking in Leon are thus: a gentleman passes on the outside, there is plenty of room, and greet passersby with a smile and an “Adiooos.”
My days begin with these passages. Rather, as I, dedicated tom-boy, wobble to work in high heels, these passages are the best things about beginning my days: I wave to the tour office and the guards outside the mill. I strut until I see Yader, he greets me with my daily kiss (on the cheek). On Yader’s corner, across from the park of poets, at the intersection with the stoplight, is the lady who grills corn. Every day she does something wonderful like wearing aprons with row upon row of frills. We bottle neck at her grill. (more…)
10 comments 1 November 2009
Businesses Look Different Here
By Meg Gray, KF9, Nicaragua
"Rent a telephone here"
Walking around my neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua made me realize that businesses look very different here. Every couple of houses there is asign in the window- “We sell nacatamales” or “We offer haircuts” or “Rent a Nintendo here”. Usually the sign is hand written, but occasionally it has been neatly typed. I only have to walk a block or two from house to find tortillas, chocolate-covered bananas, a pedicure, reading lessons, and all sorts of other things. It seems like everyone is selling something, but there is also hardly a storefront in sight.
When I moved to Managua, I was prepared to say goodbye to big box stores (more…)
10 comments 27 October 2009
Where The Streets Have No Names
By Victoria Kabak, KF9, Nicaragua
In one of our training sessions for the 9th class of Kiva Fellows at the end of September, a staffer told us that we might be living and working during our fellowships in places without street signs–because the streets are unnamed. He described how, in small towns, a direction might be given simply as “past the banana tree” or something similar. He even had a hand-drawn map that he got when he visited one of Kiva’s partners; the microfinance institution had sketched the diagram to indicate the locations of its clients, since they didn’t have addresses.
I was very interested in his anecdotes and expressed a degree of fascination along with my fellow trainees. In thinking about the challenges we all might face as Kiva Fellows, this particular obstacle hadn’t occurred to me. But I was going to the capital city of a country, not a small rural village. It was certainly intriguing to hear, but it wasn’t going to be directly relevant to me, I thought.
17 comments 21 October 2009
Dignity and Exhaustion
by Kelly McKinnon, KF9, Leon, Nicaragua
My attraction to Kiva and to their model of how microfinance fits into development, I’ve realized, has very much to do with their insistence upon the dignity of the individual. Throughout the Kiva Fellows training, through conversations and actions this concept was repeated, emphasized and modeled. I’m wishing I had the presence of mind to recognize that this exact insistence is what drew me here in the first place, wishing I recognized long ago this is what I felt during my summer in Honduras, wishing I had the eloquence to express this when I interviewed for this fellowship or for the dozens of forms I find myself filling out.
But my goodness! How guarding the dignity of another person is a delicate thing!
I visited my first client. An older woman in a nightgown opens the door to us; my exuberant colleague recognizes our intrusion and apologizes for the disturbance. We sit in the sala to explain what a journal update is, how Kiva is an odd funding entity that wants to know her dreams. She rocks back and forth, comfortable in her own home, but not in light of our probing questions. She is tired. I cannot pick her out of a family picture resting on the coffee table. The cast on her left wrist rests on a pillow in her lap. She is thin and her movements are those of someone who is more than just tired.
I am struck not by sadness, but by her honesty, her resolution. I sit in front of her embarrassed to be here as a business woman. She does not look to me for pity. As a business woman, she answers my questions. I am more grateful for Kiva’s oddity, for its requirement that the practice of business recognize this dignity.
We ask a woman with cancer what are her dreams. She is 66 and says with equal pragmatism that she has no dreams and that her loan payments are never late.
16 comments 13 October 2009
Following The No Pago Movement in Nicaragua
By Victoria Kabak, KF9, Nicaragua
As some of you may have noticed, this week a notification was placed underneath the borrower profiles on all loans to Nicaraguan borrowers on Kiva.org. It reads, in part:
In mid 2008, a movement began in Nicaragua called “Movimiento No Pago” (a movement for non-payment of loans). This movement, supported mostly by farmers of the north of Nicaragua with ties to the left-wing party in Nicaragua, has been organizing protests (some violent) and forcing microfinance institution branches to close…This group has submitted a law to the government to create a moratorium on debt repayment. The group contends it will not make payments on their loans until such law is passed. If passed, the law could have a crippling effect on the microfinance industry and banking sector in Nicaragua. The network of microfinance institutions in Nicaragua (ASOMIF) has been negotiating with the government in support of an alternative proposal.
During our training two weeks ago in San Francisco, I learned for the first time about the “No Pago” movement, known formally as “el Movimiento de Productores, Comerciantes, Microempresarios y Asalariados del Norte,” or the Movement of Farmers, Merchants, Microentrepreneurs, and Wage-workers of the North (among other similar names). Giovanna, Kiva’s Microfinance Parternships Manager for the Americas, wanted me and the other two KF9ers going to Nicaragua to know about the situation in advance.
I could write pages and pages about what’s going on, but I’ll give just a brief summary. (more…)
11 comments 8 October 2009
Bienvenidos a Nicaragua!
By Meg Gray, KF9, Nicaragua
Last Thursday night, while eating a farewell dinner of Chinese take-out, I drew the perfect fortune cookie: “Traveling to the south will bring you unexpected happiness.” Since I was leaving for Nicaragua the next day as a member of KF9, I was happy to have this auspicious omen on my side.
Turns out it was also exactly the reassurance I needed as I arrived in Managua, Nicaragua during a torrential rainstorm on Saturday night. Moments after a very turbulent (and somewhat terrifying) landing, the power went out in the airport and we had to wait for it to come back before we could deplane. Needless to say, waiting in the plane, I had a few doubts and remembering my fortune cookie brought a smile back to my face.
Here is CEPRODEL's main office. They have 16 other branches throughout Western Nicaragua.
Now that feels so long ago. I successfully made it through Day One at CEPRODEL, one of Kiva’s field partners in Nicaragua. CEPRODEL has been a Kiva partner for almost two years and has facilitated loans to over 2,100 Kiva entrepreneurs! Everyone I met was extremely friendly and helpful. I’m still struggling to remember most of their names, but they have welcomed me back for Day Two nevertheless.
Before I dive too far into journal entries and borrower profiles, I briefly wanted to say hello. I look forward to your comments and to giving you more information about CEPRODEL, Nicaragua, and my experiences as a Kiva Fellow.
Learn more about CEPRODEL on their field partner page or loan to a CEPRODEL entrepreneur now! Or if you’re feeling brave and want to practice your Spanish, check out CEPRODEL’s website.
5 comments 6 October 2009
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