Posts tagged ‘Pilot’
Bringing the French flavour to Kiva in Ecuador/ Un petit goût de France pour Kiva en Equateur
I have just joined Cooperativa San Jose, a new partner of Kiva since January 2010, in the Andes mountains. My job will be to help them graduate from pilot phase to “adult” or active phase.
Kiva’s reputation has crossed the Ocean, there are indeed tons of Kiva fans across the Atlantic, not just in France…
Je serai votre relais terrain en Equateur de Mai à Aout. Je viens de rejoindre la Coopérative San José, un nouveau partenaire de Kiva depuis Janvier 2010, dans les montagnes andines. J’ai pour mission de les aider à passer de la phase pilote à la phase « adulte » ou « active ».
La notoriété de Kiva a traversé l’océan Atlantique…Il y a en réalité une myriade de fans de Kiva en Europe, et pas seulement en France…
Continue Reading 26 May 2010 at 15:27 thefrenchlily Leave a comment
Pilot Partner Posting Predicaments
By Brian Kelly, KF10, Sri Lanka
Upon arriving here at BRAC Sri Lanka in February, a brand new Kiva pilot partner, I was all ready to lace up my loan posting shoes and hit the ground running. And my MFI was ready and waiting for me. BRAC Sri Lanka decided to designate two districts as “Kiva” districts and upload borrowers from these regions to the website. BRAC offers similar products within each region, so the “Kiva regions” were all set to have a reduced interest rate due to the fact that the money from Kiva to finance these loans would be arriving at 0%. However I quickly learned how ambitious our initial posting targets were, especially in months 1 and 2 in the pilot phase on the website. (more…)
Scaling in a Saturated Market: The Kenyan Experience
Seventeen young, scared faces sit around the board room for the full-day training of new marketers. I had been present the day that this new crop of SMEP employees was being interviewed. They had assembled en masse at our head office; many of them looking like the suit they were wearing had been hastily purchased at one of the local secondhand markets in anticipation of their first job interview. In fact, they were what I refer to as “babies” the young-ish, newly graduated staffers whose faces more often look up at me when I am conducting trainings at the SMEP branch offices all over Kenya.
I don’t call them babies to disparage them, but actually to highlight the new crop of SMEP employees that is fresh-faced and wide-eyed, ready to take on challenges and work for the first MFI in Kenya.
The 17 new marketers take a while to warm up during the training – they seem scared to speak, and I think back to employee trainings I have been in the United States, where each one of us struggles to prove ourselves by opening our mouths and commenting on every nugget of information offered by the trainer. These new recruits are the latest line of offense on SMEP’s push to capture more market share in a country where microfinance is overwhelmingly popular.
The Last Days of the Dodo
by Avani Parekh-Bhatt, Kiva Fellow at SMEP in Nairobi, Kenya.
The "dodo" bird from SMEP
Jambo! I’d like to introduce myself, My name is Avani Parekh-Bhatt, I’m a 9th class Kiva Fellow and the last of my class to get to the field in Kenya. I hail from Durham, North Carolina. I believe in the power of human relationships, and grassroots led development, and I want to see the real nuts and bolts of microfinance, so that’s why I applied to be a Kiva Fellow (and to start my own microfinance organization one day.)
At my second day on the job at a Kiva fellow at my MFI, I looked out of my window in the marketing office, and saw in the garden the vestige of a time gone by, a bird that to me looked exactly like a dodo bird. You remember learning about the dodo –it’s now extinct, but living on in the faded black line drawings in elementary school textbooks. It struck me today that I am witnessing the death of the dodo at my MFI, and the creation of an entirely new species of organization.
