Hi readers!  My name is Ben Elberger and I work with Kiva as a Microfinance Partnerships Manager.  I’ll be blogging for the next six weeks from Africa as I travel with Chelsa Bocci and John Berry, Kiva Microfinance Partnership Directors, to our partners in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique.

Right now, I’m sitting in my friends’ dining room packing up final things and getting ready to head out to Dulles Airport for my flight to Entebbe (via Amsterdam).  Chelsa and I will meet up in Amsterdam and we’ll rendezvous with John in Uganda.  It’s exciting, I’m a little nervous, but it will be amazing to see the impact of Kiva’s work in the field and to explore new partnerships with great microfinance institutions.  We’ll begin the trip in Uganda at the 3rd African Microfinance Conference, head over to Rwanda, then visit our partners in Nairobi and Kisumu in Kenya, fly down to Dar es Salaam and visit YOSEFO and some great potential partners in Tanzania, and then visit our two partners in Mozambique as well as a few prospective Kiva partners.

We’ll try to blog every chance we get so keep coming back!

Ben

The other day I got to witness the excitement felt at PEMCI when a loan is filled on the Kiva web site. One of the loan officers had put a great deal of effort into writing a descriptive profile for Fred Wafula Lubisia, who sought a loan to purchase a motorbike.  The loan was for 1,200 USD, which is a significant loan relative to what PEMCI usually offers. The next day, I was browsing Kiva.org, and saw that the entire loan had been filled, thanks to the collective contribution of 10 lenders. I let the loan officer know, and he was initially skeptical as to how quickly it filled.  When I showed him the web page, he literally let out a shout of glee, leapt into the air, and proceeded with a bit of a celebratory dance. Immediately, he went to the calendar and made calculations as to when he would be able to hand over the keys of the bike to Fred, probably a month from now after it is shipped from Nairobi, and all the required insurance papers are filed.

For me, seeing the loan officer celebrate was a moment that encapsulated the power of Kiva. Unfortunately, not all times of the day as a Kiva fellow are as uplifting. I was sitting down for lunch when I saw a friend who works at the local Family Health International. He grew up around Malaba, and after graduating from secondary school, his widowed mother was unable to pay for him to go to the university. This greatly limited his options, but he was lucky enough to land a job doing office work at FHI. Anyways, Azikiel introduced me to the pastor he was sitting with. As we talked, he began to describe the work he is doing to address HIV-AIDS in the area. I asked him if he agreed with the statistic I had heard that around 50% of the community is infected. He said that he absolutely did not doubt it, and that he usually buries 10-15 people every Saturday in one village alone. He had a grave look on his face when he told me that it was destroying the place he grew up in. The pastor blames the high infection rate on the truckers who pass through the town. He says that women, many from the surrounding villages, as old as widows and as young as primary school girls, are driven by poverty and hunger to the main Malaba road, where they can receive 100 Ksh (about 1.50 USD) to sleep with the truckers. After becoming infected, they return to their villages, and the epidemic spreads. According to the pastor, and it was a powerful statement to hear, many of these men know what they are doing when they sleep with the women, they have an intent to kill because they don’t want to die alone.

Since my work in Malaba is with PEMCI and Kiva, I’ve tried to think about how micro-finance is related to fighting HIV-AIDS in the community. From what I have been able to ascertain, prostitution is a main factor in spreading the virus in the area, and these women are driven to prostitution because of poverty. When I asked the pastor what he suggests women to do as an alternative to prostitution, he acknowledges that there is very little he can offer. So he tells them to work harder to support themselves. The pastor is painfully aware that the problem is opportunity, not industriousness; but still, with the limited resources he has at his church, it is the best advice that he can currently give. The way I see Kiva and PEMCI’s role in addressing the crisis is in creating opportunity. PEMCI is a nascent, but burgeoning MFI with a vision to extend its hand to as many people as possible in the region. It is helping people to grow their businesses from the ground up. I have heard firsthand from the businesspeople who sell maize and onions by the side of the road, or who go door to door selling household goods, how they are able to expand their business, increase their profits, and better support their family, little by little with the help of PEMCI and Kiva. These are the fathers and mothers who will now be able to feed their young daughters enough so that they don’t have to seek money on Malaba’s main road. These are the fathers and mothers who can now pay for the secondary educations of their children, which will open up doors of just enough opportunity so that they won’t be forced into the same types of poverty. These are also the widows who can now afford to sustain themselves and won’t be compelled to desperate measures. Of course micro-finance represents just one component in helping to fight HIV-AIDS and uplift the community. It must be situated within many other more health-related and educational programs. Still, I think there can be hope that Kiva and PEMCI are having an impact.

Before arriving in Malaba as a Kiva fellow, one of the assumptions I had about the businesses is that they would be entirely profit driven. Considering the economic situation that most of the clients here are living in, I could only imagine that people’s efforts would be entirely focused on making enough money to support their own family. I have met a few people who have shattered this misconception.

One of those people is Mark Ochubi, who has provided herbal medicine to over 500 clients in Malaba for the past three years. Mark trained at the School for Alternative Medicine in Kenya, and uses herbs from all over the country to treat the multitude of health problems that Malaba faces, including syphilis, typhoid, stomach ulcers, arthritis, sickle cell anemia, malaria, AIDS, and asthma. While herbal medicine has been stigmatized and rebuked by many because of colonialism, traditional herbal medicine plays a crucial role in health care in Africa. Many maintain that its effectiveness has been proven over thousands of years, and people continue to trust it for their urgent medical needs with success.

Malaba is a border town with Uganda, and serves as the gateway to Eastern and Central Africa. Consequently, there is a constant flow of trucks passing through the town, and spending the night. Malaba’s role as a truck stop, paired with its serious poverty, has resulted in rampant prostitution, and as a result a rampant HIV infection rate. Mark explains that Malaba is one of the towns most affected by HIV-AIDS in Kenya, and estimates that over 50 percent of the inhabitants are infected. (When he told me this, I was absolutely shocked. I had been staying in Malaba for the 4 weeks, and no one had even mentioned the prevalence of HIV in the town. Beyond being shocked, it made me reconsider the time I had been spending in Malaba. How could I have gone on conducting interviews and trying to get a real perspective on businesses without knowing this crucial fact about the community. I really felt as if I had been walking around blind for four weeks. My shock turned to skepticism about the validity of Mark’s estimate. When I asked the people in the PEMCI office if they believed it was true, many of them thought that it was at least 50%. I really was in disbelief—walking around, I would have no idea that the community was so devastated by the epidemic. Maybe I’m incredibly naïve, but I haven’t seen any funerals, and there is no sense of tragedy, or even death. Its not something that is really even talked about, which I would expect if it were affecting so much of the community. There’s an NGO in Malaba that addresses the epidemic, and I’m going to try to confirm the statistic.)

Back to Mark—he directly addresses the problem of HIV-AIDS in Malaba by providing healthcare to those people who suffer from it. In fact, he tells me that many of his clients have tried the ARV treatment from health clinics, and have even come to prefer his herbal treatment.

In talking to Mark about his business, he made it clear to me that profit was a secondary motivation. Yes, at the end of the day he wants to make enough to support his family, but his principle goal is to serve the community. That is why he allows for a sliding scale of costs so that his treatment can be available to as many people as possible. This has been essential in allowing him to serve 500 people over the past three years.

Another social entrepreneur that I have come across is Florence Kaluuba, who left a job as a teacher at a prestigious secondary school to start empowerment programs for young women who are dropouts, teen mothers, or come from troubled homes. You can read more about Florence in my Kiva journal for her.

My name is Max Schoening, and I’ll be a Kiva Fellow in Malaba, western Kenya for the next six weeks. I’m part of a team of six students from Brown University that will be posting updates onto Kiva.org, as well as making a short movie about Kiva to show at the Clinton Global Initiative Summit this fall. Along with being Kiva Fellows, we are also the Brown chapter of a national organization called Students of the World. Students of the World (www.studentsoftheworld.org) is an organization with a mission to send college students to developing countries in order to document creative solutions to problems affecting the developing world. After extensive research this year, we chose Kiva because of its innovative approach to micro-finance that addresses a lack of capital that microfinance institutions have to work with. Three of the students will be volunteering with KMET, located in Kisumu, a small city off of Lake Victoria. The rest of us are working with Peoples Micro-credit & Investment Bureau (PEMCI), a small but rapidly growing micro-credit institution servicing previously ignored communities in the Teso District.
 
For starters, I’ll introduce the team working with PEMCI. Justine McGowan is a rising senior who will graduate concentrating in both Development Studies and Gender Studies, an appropriate intersection of focuses for our work at PEMCI, as women’s empowerment is a fundamental aspect of the development work being done here. Justine is also a great resource for traveling, as she has traveled most extensively out of all of us. Last summer she had an internship with an NGO in Khartoum, Sudan, in the fall she studied in Morocco, and has also spent time in Tanzania teaching English. It’s pretty much a daily occurrence that I ask her “can I eat this.” Ryan Heath graduated from Brown in 2005 with a degree in Biology, experience in leadership education, and an interest in international work. He joined Students of the World last year on a trip to Addis Ababa to film a documentary on Voluntary Counseling and Testing for HIV, and spent this year helping organize this year’s project.  Lastly, I’m a rising junior studying International Relations. I’m especially interested in how global media interacts with international issues, and have also developed an interest in documentary photography while doing Darfur advocacy for the past couple of years. Being a Kiva fellow presents an incredible opportunity for me to practice documentary photography and put it to good use, and Kiva is a relevant study on how the internet and media production is affecting development, building transnational connections, as well as hopefully changing the way that the developing world is perceived by the first world.
 
We arrived in Malaba, population approx. 7,000, on Sunday, May 27th. Malaba is a border town with Uganda, and the office is literally a 10 minute bike ride from crossing over. Torroro rock, a beautiful mesa shaped mountain in Uganda, protrudes from the skyline, and while riding through the countryside visiting entrepreneurs, the motorbike drivers often point to a valley dotted with reflecting roofs and say “there’s Uganda.”

As a border town, there are constantly trucks on the main strip, called Uganda Road. During the day, they pass through chugging out exhaust, and as it gets dark, drivers fill the Malaba center strip with their parked cabs. Malaba is a central exit point for cargo that enters Kenya in Mombassa, a port city on the eastern coast. The trucks pass through Nairobi and then exit Kenya through Malaba. Carrying huge loads (occasionally illicitly huge, as drivers sometimes bribe customs officials to surpass the weight limit—a corruption felt when you bump your head on the ceiling of the car while passing through town),  these trucks depart from Malaba for Uganda, Southern Sudan, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and sometimes Malawi. It’s pretty interesting imagining yourself in a main artery that connects the flows of East Africa.
 
As we’ve also learned about border towns, much of the business (obviously not Kiva business) is conducted illicitly, and at night. Whether capitalizing on a disparity in prices, or taxes between Uganda and Kenya, avoiding customs taxes, or the prostitution that services the truck drivers who must spend the night, there is definitely a shadow economy. This gives Malaba a distinct feeling of place also characterized by constant movement and transport. By far, however, the overwhelming majority of business in Malaba is hard honest work.

As far as we can tell, we are the only white people in Malaba, so when we walk through town all eyes are on us—at least for now. Children, and even some adults, shout “Mzungu”, Swahili for “white person” as we pass by. Even though it is not meant in a derogatory tone, it can certainly make you self-conscious. The surprise, and sometimes pure shock on the faces of the young children when we pass through the smaller towns in the Teso district is understandable. As the loan officers at PEMCI have explained, we may be the first white people they have ever seen.
 
PEMCI, the MFI we are working with, is a newly started micro-credit institution. Margaret Karuri, a Kenyan woman with extensive experience with development in Africa, started it two years ago with a vision to serve communities and businesses that had been previously neglected by commercial banks and even other MFIs. For instance, when we made a visit to businesses in Chemasiri, a small town on the outskirts of the Teso district, a successful farmer explained his town’s new experience of micro-credit. As he described, other banks and MFI’s had never served his town. He gushed about the powerful impact PEMCI’s loans have had on his community, especially the newfound hope felt by people in a town that had been previously isolated from capital to catalyze growth. He said that even in a short period of time the community has been connected with PEMCI, he has been able to notice an increase in quality of life—with decreased poverty, increased food production, and even a reduction of health problems. Personally, with a PEMCI loan, he had been able to increase his maize production to 6 acres, which lowered the price the local schools paid him.
 
Our daily work with PEMCI consists of going out into the field with loan officers and meeting with small businesses. Because PEMCI serves people throughout the entire Teso district, visiting borrowers can be up to a 30-40 minute ride on motorbike. These rides are probably one of the most fun parts of being a Kiva Fellow. Riding on the back of the bike with the loan officer driving, we go far into the countryside, many times on back roads. The landscape is stunningly beautiful with lush green hills and valleys, tall maize fields glistening in the noon sun, and red dirt roads. As we drive, we pass all sorts of people walking the roads, whether it be primary school children in bright blue or yellow uniforms, mamas carrying a baby on their back and grain in their arms, young men herding cattle, or an old man in a suit.
 
Once we arrive at the small towns, we meet with the loan groups. Loans are given out to groups of about 10-15 people. The communal nature of the loan giving allows for people to pool money together so that they can have enough seed money for a loan. The way the group works is that there is an order in the group in which members can receive loans. Once the first loan is given out, the second person in the order can only receive a loan once the first recipient makes loan repayments consistently on time. Following in the same pattern, the third person can only receive a loan once the second person has consistently made repayments, all the way up to the last person. From what I understand, this is the basic standard for micro-credit. The group format is crucial in many ways. It provides a support system for people to be able to make their repayments. If one business has a tough week, others in the group can contribute to their loan repayment, because they all have self-interest in each individual repaying their loan. Also, the groups create peer pressure to manage the business wisely, and make loan repayments on time. Moreover, from what I have been told here, the cooperation and mutual support that the loan groups establish transcends loan repayment and affects the ways that businesses interact in the community. It builds on an already established notion of common fate and mutual support in many of these rural communities, and facilitates cooperation and common interest among the business community.
 Because PEMCI works with businesses that may have never received loans before, a large aspect of their work is geared towards teaching people how to borrow, save, and grow their businesses. The loan officers who go out into the field every day work extremely hard, and sometimes even seven days a week to help teach and organize businesses. The group setting for loan giving provides a good setting for the loan officers to be able to teach a larger audience, and it also allows for people to learn together and eventually teach each other.
 
Meeting with the Kiva entrepreneurs for one week, we have already heard many inspiring stories. People are overcoming tremendous personal challenges in places where much of the population makes a dollar a day or less. With Kiva loans, Rose Amoit has grown her clothing business to a point where she was able to purchase the land to buy her own store, rather than rent, and also expand the business to include a salon. This is a recently widowed woman who faces the responsibility of raising her child on her own. Peter Okibayi started a shop in Moding this year in order to provide for an enormous family. Already supporting eight of his own children, when his brother passed away three years ago, he took on the responsibility of the 19 children he had had through two wives. Already overcoming a childhood as an orphan that forced him into casual labor, Peter is working hard with Kiva’s help to expand his business and provide for 27 children.
 
We all look forward to continuing to meet with the people of western Kenya who have already been so welcoming. We’ll continue to relay our experiences through journals and the blog.