The Lemonade Stand

Kiva is a website where anyone with access to Paypal can make a loan of US$25 or more, specifically to a microentrepreneur, located in any of an ever-growing number of countries. You can browse profiles of these people, learn about their businesses, find out how much they want to borrow, and then contribute towards their loan.

When they repay the loan, your money is returned to you, interest-free. In the unlikely event that they cannot make their repayments, you could lose your money. But default rates for each of their partners on the ground are listed clearly on the website, and they are usually very low. The Kiva partner that I was working with over the last few months experienced problems with fewer than 1% of its borrowers.

But Kiva is about more than just microfinance. In fact, Kiva’s motto is “Connecting people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.”

How does that work? Well, the profiles of borrowers on the Kiva website contain a story about them, little details that help you decide who you want to lend to based on some kind of connection. I spoke to a woman who wanted a microloan so she could buy and sell recyclables from her house, instead of going out to scavenge through dumpsters. This would allow her to spend more time with her 2 young children. Her loan was funded quickly, and I’d imagine some lenders were probably motivated by her desire to be more present in her children’s lives.

More than that, Kiva sends a cadre of Fellows all over the world to manage their relationships with the partner microfinance organizations that actually make the loans on the ground. These Fellows (myself included, because that’s what I’ve been doing these past few months) interview borrowers and tell their stories. Often, the impact of a loan ties into other parts of their lives.

Most recently, I saw a video about a Kiva borrower called Nermina. A war widow in Bosnia, she used her loan – funded $25 at a time by people like you and me, through Kiva – to buy a greenhouse, so she can support her kids financially. Told through the eyes of Kiva Fellow, Milena Arciszewski, Sloane Berrent calls this a “compelling, tragic and unforgettable story.”

Watching Nermina speak was like a punch in the gut. 200,000 people murdered, mostly Bosnian Muslims. The worst genocide in Europe since World War 2. I haven’t been to a museum or a memorial or any other place in which these atrocities have been documented. But I got to hear it directly from Nermina, because of her Kiva loan and my interest in microfinance.

Part of responding to any tragedy – war or poverty – is documenting stories from survivors. Providing them with capital through microfinance also helps, but I’m glad that Kiva is going above and beyond, doing its part to listen to and record the stories of people who are surviving poverty every day, and making them available to the world so we can all learn and remember. Here is the video of Nermina.

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