Kiva

Kiva Lending Team: Kiva Mormons

October 1, 2008 by rickety 6 Comments

I’ve blogged about Kiva before. Kiva is a non-profit organization that uses the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions to enable individuals to lend as little as $25 to help fund small businesses run by low-income entrepreneurs. The lender chooses who to lend to from a database of profiles. When the loan is repaid the money can be withdrawn or loaned out again.

I have made several loans and they have been repaid within 6 months to a year. It is a lot of fun to pick where you want the loan to go and also to lend your money again and again to help someone. A change was made recently where you get your payments back immediately instead of having to wait for all of the loan to be repaid.

Another change that I like very much is the introduction of Kiva Lending Teams. Members of these teams continue lending as individuals, but they have the option to count each loan they make towards the overall impact of one of their teams. As of today there are 1,650 Kiva Lending Teams. The top team in terms of members is the Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious with 845 members. I passed on that one, I wouldn’t be able to remember the name of my team. KivaFriends.org has the highest number of loans at 2,236 and the highest dollar amount, $58,575.00.

I joined Kiva Mormons with 61 members, 107 loans with a dollar amount of $3,350. Here is what part of our lending page looks like today. It will change as more loans are made. Recognize me on the left?

You can see who on your team made the last five loans. The loan from Orange Third Relief Society, which is classified as an individual lender but is made up of several women. Only new loans can be credited to a team so you have to wait until a loan is repaid and a new loan made before it can be counted. This is important for our friendly rivalry with the Flying Spaghetti Monster. With just 71 members (10 more than us) they have 209 loans, leaving us in the dust. Then there are the Kiva Baha’is that raced passed us with 157 loans with only, get this, 14 team members.

Are you are part of a Kiva Lending Team? Tell me about it and why you joined your particular team.

Rickety Kiva Map

August 14, 2008 by rickety Leave a Comment

Kiva, back on July 23, announced Kiva Maps. To show you what it looks like, consider my own Rickety Kiva Map above. Each of the leaves represents one of my loans all emanating from Kaysville. Neat huh? It is just a Google map so you can zoom in for more detail. In Cambodia I have a number of loans as you can see in the detail map.

Every day over 16,000 people all over the world are viewing Kiva. Kiva Maps also uses the Google Maps API on each Entrepreneur Profile page to show the geographic distribution of lenders to that Entrepreneur. Check it out by clicking “Map View” in the “Lenders to this Business” section.

Kiva did experience some problems shortly after going live with the feature. There were some Internet Explorer issues (as usual), and they also ran up against Google’s limit of 15,000 geocoding requests per day very quickly. Seeing Kiva laid out on a map will show how big this thing really is and encourage even more people to participate.

Below is the geographic distribution of lenders for one of my borrowers, pardon me, one of my entrepreneurs. Picks me right out in little old Kaysville.

Related Posts: Kiva

Kiva

June 7, 2008 by rickety Leave a Comment

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. I started using Kiva last year.

When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

Kiva partners with existing expert micro finance institutions. They are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. The power of the internet is used to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Kiva creates a interpersonal connection at much lower costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery.

You can personalize a web page on Kiva, here is mine.

Articles about micro finance:
The Six Lessons of Kiva
Fight Poverty With Online Microlending
Business Lessons from Kiva
eBay’s New Direction: Micro-Finance