I joined Kiva in June 2015. Time to see how the project is going.
Kiva is based in the US so my loans are in $s. I make loans in increments of $25 and have paid in $184. Call me a philanthropist but I’m a micro-philanthropist not a Bill and Melinda macro-game-changer. I hope every little bit helps and yesterday I lent $25 to a potato farmer in Mali, my first loan to Mali. As you know the French military have pulled out of Mali as inopportunely as the US and UK have cast off Afghanistan like an old glove. And, yes, I didn’t know spuds are grown in Mali but they are sweet potatoes – an increasingly important contribution to the Mali economy. In 2019 Mali exported 30,000 tonnes that raised $2.25 million. Here is Gnine’s story.
“Gnine is the woman sitting in the potato field, alone in the photo because of COVID-19. Gnine is a Malian woman married to a local farmer. She is the mother of a 7-year-old child who goes to school. She has been in this business for 20 years. Illiterate, she farms potatoes in the winter to earn a living and to be able to support her child. Gnine is turning to a loan with RMCR, because she has neither the means nor the equipment to be able to increase her farmable surface and better take care of her field. With the loan from RMCR, she will buy more potato seeds and fertilizer and will buy for labor and transport for her field. Her work being seasonal, she foresees earning 150,000 FCFA for the season.” (Kiva website)
Is 150,000 FCFA big potatoes? No, it’s not; $270 in real money.
Now I have made forty loans to 38 countries. I have lent $1,000 from my input of $184. There have been a few defaults ($20 or 2.5%) but the success stories more than make up for them. My bee keeper in Nicaragua has repaid my $25. Here’s her story.
“We had the pleasure of speaking Betzabe who has been a beekeeper for the past ten years. She runs a honey business in Nicaragua, primarily selling honey to a co-op in her community. Betzabe has three locations to which she moves her hives around throughout the year depending on conditions. She has benefited significantly from this Kiva loan. She has had great success and reports high demand for honey under normal circumstances, but she has had a setback due to hurricane Iota in November 2020, which affected her region. Betzabe’s hives and most of the equipment remained intact but the bees have not returned yet, and the community as a whole is recovering from the impact.
Mrs Betzabe currently owns 12 beehives, a honey extractor, and a small pickup truck. She also has some equipment and utensils that are used for honey extraction and processing. She hopes in the near future to be able to expand her capacity to around 33+ beehives. At the moment she is working on running her business again once the bees return, but due to the setback, her resources and available funds are stretched thin. She is working on repaying the current loan and managing general expenses simultaneously. Apart from beekeeping she and her husband are able to support themselves by farming and the husband’s job as a builder. Farming specifically has suffered due to the hurricane damaging crops.
Betzabe received a Kiva loan of $3,000 which is the main source of funding for the equipment she owns. It allowed her to purchase additional beehives, wooden boxes, frames, and other material for honey processing.
Betzabe is extremely thankful for this loan and expresses how much of a blessing it was for her in changing the capacity of her business and contributing to her livelihood. With her devotion and passion that she has for her business, not only has the loan allowed her to generate enough income to provide her children with education, but also a better quality of life through home improvement.” (Kiva website)
I also lend through a UK charity: Lendwithcare.
Well done, Christopher! You have inspired me to loosen my wallet and make my own loan(s) to KIVA. Thank you!
Marvellous idea. I didn’t know about this scheme. Thank you for the information.
Kiva is wonderful, thank you for highlighting it here. I’ve kept re-lending my little bit for years , and it is amazing how it adds up (just cycled in five new loans this weekend). I’ve run out of new countries to lend to, but one can select categories of use as well as countries, so this last round was “arts” (which usually ends up being handicrafts). If someone has children or grandchildren, it can be fun to go through options together and let them choose the loans, learning about people, jobs, and places as they do so.
I came across Lendwithcare a couple of years ago and supported a lady pig farmer in South America who has a deaf son to care for. What to us, are fairly trivial amounts, make so much difference to these men & women. With no social services safety net, they work so hard to support their families, it puts many of us to shame.
I’d not heard of Kiva, so will be looking into starting further lending loans through them.
Has Monica Simmons gone to South America?
“The Amazonian Miss Simmons is one of six daughters of a rural vicar, all of whom played hockey for Roedean. A graduate of an Agricultural College, she becomes Lord Emsworth’s pig-tender, first appearing in Pigs Have Wings. She is at first viewed with some suspicion by Emsworth, mostly due to her being niece to Sir Gregory Parsloe-Parsloe, his rival, but also in part thanks to her habit of referring to the mighty Empress as a “piggy-wiggy”, a term which later becomes rather comforting to his lordship.
She returns to the pen in Galahad at Blandings, in which she is courted by the diminutive Wilfred Allsop, and must defend her charge from the devious Huxley Winkworth.”
Nice to see you have a heart, after having read your vulgar, racist post on British Baroque.