KIVA'S BLOG
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The White House Announces Microfinance Growth Fund
- Posted on 04.21.09
Related causes: Community
Over the weekend, the White House announced a new $100 million microfinance growth fund for the western hemisphere:
The global credit crisis is having a significant and harmful impact on the availability of finance for micro and small businesses that provide a majority of the jobs in the Hemisphere. This is one of the factors jeopardizing recent hard won gains in reducing poverty. While the region has a wealth of microfinance institutions, these lenders are now confronting a serious shortage of private finance from both international and local sources. As the supply of lending is shrinking, the demand for smaller loans is expanding as job loss escalates and the newly unemployed are falling back on micro and small enterprises as their sole source of income.
Today the President announced a new partnership of the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), and the Inter-American Investme...Read More -
Poverty Isn’t Always Pretty
- Posted on 04.09.09
Wrapping up my six month fellowship with Kiva, I’m not sure how to express that thought any more artfully. On balance I’ve been inspired by the people I’ve met who, with only meager means, must spend long days at arduous tasks in order to support their families. But I’ve also had to confront the reality that a life in poverty often means making hard choices every day. The temptation to judge these decisions can be tempting until you realize that in many cases people have few good options on the table.
In Tajikistan I spent many days in the bazaars and was initially surprised at the number of school-aged children pushing carts or making change. Why are they not in school working toward a university education and a good job? The easiest answer is that there are no good jobs in Tajikistan. In a past blog post, I explained the challenges faced by Tajiks seeking to pursue an education or more viable jobs.
One day Sulton Kurbonov stopped at the MicroInvest office to make a...Read More -
What Happened (Matt Flannery)
- Posted on 09.09.08
It's been about ten days since released the community and liquidity features. I'd say it worked out slightly better than I expected. Here's roughly what happened.
On Thursday the 29th we started the process of making liquid all of the payments that had been returned to Kiva, but which had not been returned to our users. We ran a script which 'settled' all of these 'unsettled but received' funds into our users accounts. The script walked through every unsettled payment and settled it, a process which took several hours. While this was being initiated we took the site down. After the payments were settled, we began the process of emailing each user who received Kiva Credit and let them know the good news.
At the same time, we released the Lending Teams feature. So, as users were coming back to use their new Kiva Credit they also learned about the new ways they can connect on the site by joining a team.
We had a lot of activity, in the first 10 days since the event, ...Read More -
Liquidity and Community (Matt Flannery)
- Posted on 09.03.08
Kiva has a pretty important software release in a couple of days.
First, we are releasing a "community" section of the site. The purpose of the section is clear enough -- to foster a sense of community among the 300K plus Kiva lenders. The way we are going about this is somewhat incremental. We are starting Thursday by launching Lending Teams on the site. This is way overdue. Lending Teams provide a way for lenders to group themselves together around certain affinities or themes of their choosing. Lenders can then choose to "count" their loans to one of their teams and the teams performance is statistically tracked and compared with other teams.
We've been getting requests to help serve groups like schools, churches, book clubs, etc for over two years. It just took this long to get the feature up there because of our org's historical focus on getting partners signed up and reducing risk on the platform. User facing features were de-prioritized in 2007 and half of 20...Read More
