Kiva Stories from the Field

On Friday, with the help of the NorMicro staff, I held a “Kiva Training Session” for the employees of the Azerbaijani Kiva Field Partners. There were seventeen of us total, representing NorMicro, Komak, and AqroInvest. Bahman (NorMicro’s Director) suggested that I hold the training, while Tasaduf (NorMicro’s Human Resources Manager) worked really hard to get us a very nice briefing room in Baku’s fancy Caspian Business Plaza. For over three hours we discussed (in English and Azerbaijani, with translation by Tasaduf!) pertinent Field Partner topics, such as writing Kiva business descriptions, taking good client photos, how to post business profiles, and writing journal entries. The attendees had lots and lots of good questions and are obviously committed to further enhancing their Kiva efforts!

I made sure we had an internet connection and a projector so everyone could experience Kiva.org — some of the attendees have not yet worked with Kiva, while others do not have consistent internet access in their offices. During the presentation I surfed through the website, highlighting important points and answering questions about lenders and clients. (I even impressed them with the fact that almost 12% of all Kiva funds, thus far, have gone to Azerbaijani clients!) One thing I really focused in on was that Kiva lenders are individuals – I think it’s easy for the uninitiated loan officer to assume that Kiva is just some faceless American corporation throwing big money at international projects. I pulled up Hajibaba’s business profile and used Mrs. Diba’s Class as an example of Kiva’s lenders. The mental image of six-year-olds collecting pennies for Hajibaba really helps illustrate the Kiva spirit!!     

To train the newbies and reinforce Kiva’s processes to the experienced loan officers, we used a “real” client as an example. We tested out the new Kiva Form created by Adam (Peace Corps Volunteer assigned to NorMicro) as a means of systematically improving information flow between loan officers and the individuals who post the Kiva listings. Next, we all worked together to develop a concise, but detailed business description. Finally, Behbud (NorMicro’s Beylagan Branch Kiva Coordinator) walked us through posting a profile – keep an eye out for Rafig’s profile!

The Kiva Training attendees:

The response to the training was very encouraging and I expect that the Azerbaijani Kiva listings will soon be even better! The training was a little bittersweet for me – I leave in just one week!  Time has flown! I am sad to go, but I guess I do need to get back home and finish up my degree at some point   I hope to post some links to pictures before I leave!

OK, I’m not really lost, but I have been traveling like crazy the past two or so weeks and have not been able to keep up with journals or blogs! I apologize for the length of this, but I’ll try to recap:

14 – 16 July: I jumped on a mashrutka (a fancy name for a really old, unsafe, run-down mini-bus) and headed two hours north of Baku to NorMicro’s branch office in Khachmaz. I spent Saturday hanging out with Azerbaijani friends I have made on previous visits to Khachmaz this summer. On Sunday I went to the modest seaside resort town of Nabran, but unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate much and the water was really cold. On Monday I visited eight Kiva clients in Khachmaz with translation help from Adam, the U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer assigned to NorMicro in Khachmaz. We walked all over Khachmaz locating clients – at least I’m getting exercise to offset the amount of food I’ve been eating! I’ve been to Khachmaz often enough now that I know a lot of people there – it’s fun to spot clients I’ve visited on previous trips and see that things are still going well for them. While I was in Khachmaz, I spent my nights with two different host families. Azerbaijanis rank near the top of the list of the most hospitable people of the planet…but I do have to admit, all the attention and food and cousins and tea and wedding videos and more tea and photo albums does get a bit exhausting! I definitely did not have a chance to write-up any of my Kiva journals while I was the guest of those families!! (Photo: People and cows enjoying the beach at Nabran.)

17 July: I caught an early mashrutka to the small town of Devechi and met up with Adam and Nafira, a loan officer at NorMicro’s Khachmaz branch. We visited fourteen clients in the Devechi bazaar – nearly every vendor in the bazaar is a NorMicro client! Nafira is very efficient and is well-liked by her clients, so our visits went smoothly and quickly. After a late lunch of mutton kebabs, I returned to Baku.

19 – 20 July: The next morning I took yet another early mashrutka to the central Azerbaijani town of Agsu. In the two days I spent there, I visited twenty Kiva clients with the help of the branch manager, Namik, and his friendly staff. The talk of the town in Agsu that week was the municipality’s new mandate that all street-front shops conform to a specific architectural design. The idea is that Agsu will look much more appealing once all the ramshackle shops are torn down. The downside for shop owners is that the municipality is not helping out at all with the costs of remodeling. They are, however, providing the demolition free of charge. Khilgat’s rented shop had been torn down 2 days before my visit, and Terlan’s shop was scheduled for demolition later in the week. Despite the bad news, the clients were in relatively good humor and showed me the color blueprints for the approved Agsu storefronts, so kindly provided by the municipality. Following these two days of visits I experienced my most exciting taxi ride in Azerbaijan thus far (and that’s saying something…!) – me, two other women, and three children in the backseat of a Lada, with me holding onto a stranger’s baby. Many high-speed hairpin turns and two hours later, we arrived – safely – in Baku. (Photo: Me with NorMicro’s Agsu Branch staff)

21-21 July: Saturday was devoted to spending quality time with my host family – we visited three different aunts in Baku, and, of course, ate and drank tea with all of them. I finally got time Sunday to head to a coffee shop I had found recently that has free wi-fi – it’s geared towards upper crust Bakuvians and expats, so the food and drink prices keep me from hanging out too long! I did manage to get some work done, though!

23 July: I have had so much success in visiting clients with Nafira that I returned to her region to visit six more Kiva clients that live in a small village outside Devechi. Adam and Vagif, another loan officer, helped us out. I was eager to visit agricultural businesses after so much time visiting retail and trading businesses. It was a very, very, very warm afternoon, but the clients were friendly and the visits were rewarding.

24 July: ACDI|VOCA and AMFA class on success stories and business descriptions.

25 July: After reviewing the materials from the business descriptions class, Bahman, the director of NorMicro suggested that I prepare formal Kiva training for his staff. I spent most of the day developing a training plan and trying to locate a venue to hold the training in. My plan is get a projector and an internet connection and walk the staff through everything – understanding how Kiva works, posting business descriptions, journals, etc. I think that seeing the website and understanding who the lenders are will be highly beneficial, especially for those loan officers and branch managers who rarely use the internet and may not yet fully understand the person-to-person connection that Kiva fosters. I expect that this training will enhance the Kiva listings coming from Azerbaijan! Hopefully, we will conduct the training next week…I’ll post an update!

26 – 27 July: I spent two days visiting Kiva clients in the industrial town of Sumgayit. As we pulled into Sumgayit, thick black smoke was billowing out of some sort of plant and was hovering over the town. This town was once the center of the Soviet chemical industry and held the dubious distinction of being one of the world’s most polluted cities. The demise of the Soviet Union resulted in bankrupt factories (but cleaner air), unemployment, plus an influx of internally displaced persons (IDPs) from the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict. I visited eighteen clients here with help from NorMicro staff members Tasaduf, Ahmed, Bahram, and Board Member, Adalat. (Photo: Sumgayit’s Martyr’s Monument on the Caspian Sea.)

29 July – 1 August (already!?): I spent several days in the southern Azerbaijani town of Beylagan. With the help of NorMicro branch staff members Behbud, Eldaniz, and Arif, and U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer, Carlo, I visited sixteen Kiva clients. I also managed to get some kind of food poisoning that made me fully appreciate the plumbing and toilet situation I have in my place back in Houston! Nonetheless, the client visits went well and I have fully recovered.

2 August: The staff of AqroInvest, another Kiva Field Partner in Azerbaijan, invited me to spend the day traveling to their branch offices in the towns of Imishli, Saatli, Sabirabad, and Bilasuvar. We visited three different IDP villages – I’ll try to post a separate blog about these villages…

3 August: Finally back in the NorMicro head office in Baku – internet access!!

Thanks for reading this far!! I leave Azerbaijan in two weeks, after having spent three months here. I’m starting to get sad. But now I gotta get busy finishing up journals!

Yesterday in Baku, sixteen Azerbaijanis from seven MFIs filled a small conference room for a class on writing business descriptions and success stories. They were craving training, not only on these critical elements of promoting their organizations, but also on writing in the English language. Among the attendees, employees from Kiva’s three Azerbaijani field partners were present: Murad and Jeyhun from NorMicro, Ulviyya from Komak, and Tamilla from AqroInvest.

The class was organized by Paul at ACDI|VOCA through the Azerbaijan Micro-Finance Association (AMFA) after he detected a high demand from the Azerbaijani MFIs for such training. Paul spent about an hour teaching methods for writing success stories. He touched on basics like length, structure, and formatting. The importance of considering the audience that will read the story was stressed. He also spent time discussing the importance of well-composed photos – a topic that was well-received by the attendees.

I spent about an hour discussing the elements of a quality (interesting!) business description. I tried to impress upon the attendees that they have the opportunity through these business descriptions to educate international lenders about Azerbaijan, the local industries, and living conditions for the entrepreneurs. I used actual Kiva examples and the attendees rewrote the business descriptions using a Kiva-based format I provided. Paul had a projector set-up to his computer, so we were able to project Kiva.org on the wall and click through listings to reinforce the importance of quality business descriptions. Hopefully, having a pre-made template and seeing some English-language examples will aid these MFIs in bulking up their business descriptions.

As the class was wrapping up, Paul mentioned a follow-on class covering English-language emails and PowerPoint training – everyone received those topics enthusiastically. They were also interested in a class on photo composition and photo editing (cropping, straightening, brightening). Additionally, a couple of the Kiva partners here have asked me to help them create systems for more efficient posting and one partner is interested in learning how to post videos! Looks like I’ll be teaching a couple more classes! I’m really hoping that the training and interest will be translated into high quality Azerbaijani postings that more accurately represent the great entrepreneurs here!

Walking with a NorMicro loan officer through a small town bazaar in Azerbaijan is like walking with a pop star through a suburban American shopping mall. In Devechi, Nafira was mobbed by dozens of prospective clients as she led me through the crowded market stalls in search of Kiva clients. As he helped translate my interviews in Agsu, Namik often had to field questions from clients about the likelihood of their friend or neighbor getting a loan. The weekly “reception day” in each NorMicro branch office – that is, the day when clients make payments, drop off applications, and just stop by to chat – creates a constant stream of dozens of clients passing through the offices. In many small Azerbaijani towns, the only banking institutions interested in serving the low-income population are a handful of small MFIs. Many of the clients I met enthusiastically expressed their gratitude at having access to these micro banking services – without NorMicro and similar MFIs, they would have no way to improve their businesses and their families’ situations.

In the early nineties, Azerbaijan got hit with an economic double-whammy: the simultaneous collapse of the Soviet Union and the war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Under the Soviet system, subsidies prevented extreme poverty and the huge bureaucracy created many government jobs. A uniformly mediocre standard of living existed across the Soviet Republics. The fall of the U.S.S.R. resulted in the loss of this government-strung safety net, leaving many Azerbaijanis jobless and without government subsidies to pick up the slack as the country transitioned from command to market economy. Throw nearly 700,000 citizens (10% of the population) displaced by the Armenian occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, and a full-out economic crisis was created.

Fast-forward fourteen years later and most of the 700,000 IDPs are still living in “temporary” housing while the government has turned its attention to the country’s oil reserves. This “resource curse” has left much of the population oscillating between a meager sustainable existence and extreme poverty, despite the oil revenues supposedly flooding into the country (reference Venezuela and Nigeria). What infrastructure did exist in the Soviet days is deteriorating and health care, roads, electricity, water, and sewage systems are substandard and unreliable in much of the country. Politics-driven policies have prevented the IDPs from fully-integrating into their new communities, and many live isolated in abject poverty even in the shadows of Baku’s oil mansions.

Hang with me while I get even more technical for a minute. Statistics indicate that 49% of Azerbaijanis live below the poverty line, and up to 85% earn very low wages and live at very low standards. Inflation is 8%, ranking Azerbaijan 170 out of 224 countries. The Azerbaijani government officially classifies unemployment at 1.2% (or the fifth lowest unemployment rate in the world), an implausibly low statistic which brings me to the topic of corruption. Azerbaijan is in an eight-way tie for the 130^th most corrupt nation (out of 160) on the Transparency International 2006 Corruption Perception Index.

The Azerbaijani microfinance industry stands out as the single beacon of honesty and goodwill in a country where corruption is deeply ingrained in government services. The clients appreciate the fact that when they apply for loans through MFIs they do not have to pay the hefty “application fee” (known elsewhere as a bribe!) that they must pay at other banking institutions. The MFIs, with international assistance, are motivated by a sense of national pride and concern for their countrymen, and have thus far kept the industry free of the pervasive corruption found in other sectors of society. Microfinance resources are in very high demand throughout Azerbaijan, as IDPs and other low income individuals work to gain footing in the emerging market economy. Many IDPs, like Mashuga Ismayilova, fled during the war, leaving behind their homes, possessions, and jobs. They have had to pick up new livelihoods and often still live in squalid conditions, like Devran Ibishov. But with the aid of small business loans they try and often succeed, like Khagani Nuruyev, in improving their situations. Azerbaijan has enormous potential, but the poor working-class Azerbaijanis need a helping hand to set progress in motion.

Yesterday was a rather typical day for me in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. I left my host family’s nice home and walked fifteen minutes to the nearest metro station. On the way to the metro station I passed new apartment buildings, food shops with locally-grown fruit displays, clothing stores with bright skirts hanging in the windows, street cats lolling in the sun, bored taxi drivers playing backgammon, and street vendors selling cell phone cards. I weaved through and dodged traffic when necessary, Frogger-style. $0.05, three metro stops, and three flights of stairs later, I arrived at the NorMicro head office. The head office oversees five branch offices (Baku, Sumgayit, Khachmaz, Agsu, Beylagan) that provide loans to IDPs and low-income Azerbaijanis.

I took advantage of the relatively consistent electricity and dial-up internet access that the Baku head office offers, and reviewed the Kiva.org profiles of the clients I planned to visit later in the day. Yesterday was really warm, so I opted to not have the obligatory morning cup of hot chay. I emailed two of the five NorMicro branch representatives that deal with Kiva clients and arranged visits with them for next week. When lunchtime rolled around, rather than eat the office cook’s freshly prepared meal (like I usually do – and with enjoyment!), I instead met a friend (and Kiva lender!) at an air-conditioned café on a shaded pedestrian street near the beautiful Baku Opera Theater. After a Western meal that cost more than I usually spend in an entire week, I hurried to meet up with two of the Baku branch office’s loan officers.

The loan officers and I took the company Lada , a Russian car that is now ubiquitously Azerbaijani, and innocuously slipped out of shiny-happy Baku and into her darker, forgotten side. The contrast between the growing affluent population of Baku and the limbo-stranded IDP population still unnerves me, even after seeing it routinely for over a month. Our Lada passed new three-story homes carefully concealed behind foreboding walls with impressive metal gates and turned onto a rough, unpaved road leading to a neighborhood that may as well have been in another country. It is inconceivable that I ate an expensive lunch next to a beautiful Opera House less than five kilometers from this neighborhood. Sadly, neighborhoods like this exist all over Baku and many other parts of the country, as IDPs have been temporarily settled in old government buildings until they can return to their homes in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The dusty, rocky road was lined with mismatched sheets of scavenged metal that hid the living quarters beyond. We passed a group of rickety, wooden outhouses, all padlocked so that only the owners could use them. Children obliviously darted across the road and elderly men loitered in side streets, whiling away another day. Soon, we arrived at our destination: a row of little shops, haphazardly constructed along the edge of the road to serve this IDP community. Casting ragged shadows over the shops were three decaying, seven-story buildings that would have been condemned and then demolished anywhere else. Electric wires created a twisting and ominous web between the structures. Inside the buildings, worn wooden planks or old car doors bridged growing gaps in heavily-trafficked stairwells. Clotheslines hung in the hallways and trash filled empty cavities where elevators previously resided.

Over the course of two hours, I met with eight NorMicro entrepreneurs with loans financed by Kiva lenders. They came originally from districts that border the highly contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh: Fizuli, Jabrayil, Agdam. I was impressed by the sense of pride and foresight each of these lenders have in their businesses, despite the fact that for fourteen years they have been living in neglected, isolated communities with few economic opportunities. Each of them commented on the fact that the only way they are able to improve their businesses is through the microloans offered by NorMicro. They described to me their hopes for their families and business, but admitted that these hopes were going to be very difficult to achieve.

After leaving the IDP community, I spent a little while back at the head office collecting my thoughts and making notes for the journals I will later write on these entrepreneurs. Returning home with my host family, I spent some time “paying the rent” by speaking English with the three teenage kids. Later in the evening we ate corn-on-the-cob and watermelon in a yard surrounded by a high wall and metal gate - a world away from the IDP entrepreneurs I had met earlier.

Azerbaijanis don’t smile for pictures. After six weeks of taking pictures of and with Azerbaijanis, I can say this with certainty. Truthfully, it’s driving me a little crazy. I can be having the best time with NorMicro entrepreneurs – I mean, tea and sweets are offered, hands are held, cheeks are kissed, jokes are made, marital status inquiries are made – and once they catch a glimpse of my camera they immediately put on their Serious Photo Face. It’s so frustrating! None of my journal photos even remotely convey the bubbling personality of the entrepreneurs!

Thankfully, I know it’s not just me they use the Serious Photo Face on. I’ve looked at many a wedding album since I’ve arrived and not a single person (especially the bride and groom!) smile for the photos. Wedding parties look like the worst time on Earth.

Recently, I was staying with the family of a young, female employee of NorMicro in the northern town of Khachmaz. We planned to go to the park that evening and take photos. After work, I arrived at the house amid a flurry of activity. The four sisters, an aunt, and a sister-in-law were hurriedly fixing their hair, applying makeup, and changing into dressy clothes. I even put on silver glitter eye shadow they offered me. We were set to take some killer pictures in the park. We had a great time walking through the park and taking dozens of photos, but not a single one of those photos would later indicate that we had a good time! That is, except for the one oddly smiling person in every picture: me.

Since that night of the serious park visit, I’ve been practicing my “Azerbaijani smile” so I don’t stick out in pictures so much! Here’s my best attempt, with NorMicro/Kiva client, Sarfinaz. I should point out that Sarfinaz insisted that I take a photo with her and she had been, up until the second my camera appeared, a vivacious and smiling woman!