More on Kiva
Andrew Leonard has a perceptive (and funny) piece on Kiva running on Salon.com, chiefly revolving around his discomfort with the fact that donors have to choose from among the prospective recipients. Since these are based on short, online-personals-esque profiles, you have no choice but to make snap judgments about their suitability for loans, and it’s hard not to wonder whether people are primping their profiles to bring down the $25 tranches.
While these wouldn’t be the first sell-side folks in history to try to pretty up an investment, in fact I shared some of the same discomfort. My own moment of truth involved moving past a profile for the proprietor of a “pub” -a going concern - who needed $500 for “inventory”, which seemed odd to me. In a way, it’s not unlike being in Africa yourself, where you inevitably meet large numbers of people who want something from you, at least some of whom would make successful entrepreneurs.
But what makes me comfortable with the Kiva approach that it depends not the investment savvy of internet browsers thousands of miles away, but rather an intermediary organization in every loan, Kiva’s ability to manage those organizations against repayment metrics, and the transparency of the system with respect to loans repaid. (Click through one of the orgs above and scroll down to see hard numbers of loans outstanding, in repayment, and repaid.) In the long term, this system is really about selecting the orgs not the enrepreneurs that put faces on them, and it rights itself.
In the meantime, Kiva continues to get things right. I just got notified that one of my loans was disbursed, and where I could find a journal about it. I love this follow-up, which is more personal than I’ve ever had, say, from the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, the ACLU, or any number of other organizations I’ve donated to.
I’ve given my Yahoo! holiday gift to Kiva and encouraged others to do the same, and I bought my Mom - who made microloans the old-fashioned way when she was in Africa - a gift certificate for the holidays.
