Kiva Blog
Nominate Kiva for the Chase Community Giving Contest on Facebook!
Kiva has the opportunity to win over $1,000,000 with the collective participation of our community! To nominate Kiva, vote here and search for Kiva Microfunds.
All votes made between now and December 11th will help us reach the contest’s top 100 charities list ($25,000 prize) and we can then go onto the next round.
Please vote today and share news about the contest with your friends and family. This is a team effort! You can quickly spread the word via email or through your online networks by sharing the link above.
For Twitter users, you can tweet the short message below:
Join me in voting for @Kiva to win over $1 million in #chasegiving contest! Visit http://bit.ly/A3DZw and type Kiva Microfunds.
Thank you for supporting Kiva’s mission of connecting people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty!
Vote for Matt as HuffPost's Ultimate Game Changer!
You are invited to Kiva's Fourth Birthday Party!
Join 4 community enterprises, Kiva, Hub Bay Area, GOOD Magazine and The David Brower Center, as we celebrate the remarkable achievement of 4 years and almost 100 million dollars in loans that Kiva has realized since its creation.
We're 4!
November 3, 2009
6:30pm - 9:30pm
The David Brower Center
2150 Allston Way
Berkeley, CA
Global Beats From Around The World
Baba Ken and the Afrobeat Connexion
Delicious Food Provided by Bay Area Favorites
and many more...
Drinks to Keep the Party Going
The Hub opened its' first US location in Berkeley, CA, joining a global network of 20 Hubs and 4500 social innovators around the Globe. Visit them in their new home at The David Brower Center, a platinum LEED certified building of 28 organizations focused on social innovation. We are also pleased to partner with GOOD Magazine, a catalyst for change through journalism and social media, to celebrate Kiva's 4th Birthday! Join us on November 3rd to learn more about how to join a Kiva lending group, jump onboard as a Hub member, and support the GOOD cause, all in the beautiful backdrop of The David Brower Center accompanied by hundreds of our closest friends!
Learn More About Us
Make sure to RSVP here as space is limited!
Stay Updated on Party News Through Facebook
Support Kiva in America's Giving Challenge through Facebook Causes!
Our cause on Facebook just entered in America's Giving Challenge, which gives us a chance to win $50,000!
Please donate today: http://www.causes.com/
To win, between now and November 7th we have to get the most donations to our cause (every person can donate once per day and have it count as a unique donation). We can also win daily awards of $1,000 and $500 if we can get the most people to donate in any 24-hour period. The great thing about this Challenge is that it doesn't matter how much you give, but instead how much you do to encourage friends and family to get involved in our cause. We all need to come together and start promoting the cause if we want to win.
Each of us has tons of friends on Facebook who we can ask to donate to our cause. But let's think big too—can you put our cause in your email signature, can you throw a party and get people to donate through the cause when they enter, can you organize other people to go out and fundraise from all of their friends? As you reach out to your friends be sure to tell them why this cause matters to you. The possibilities are endless so let's talk about what we can do to win on the Wall of the cause or by replying to this bulletin.
I think we can do it! But it's going to take all of us. Check out the Giving Challenge (www.causes.com), then visit our cause to see how we're doing so far and get involved.
Donate right now by going to http://www.causes.com/
Let's win $50,000 for our cause!
Come to Kiva's 4th Birthday Party!
In San Francisco we'll be celebrating this event by co-hosting a party at the Brower Center in Berkeley, CA, with The Hub Bay Area and GOOD Magazine. It'll be a chance for us to get together with members of the Kiva community - and the cool cats of GOOD and The Hub - to celebrate what Kiva has become over 4 years of work.
The party will be held in a few weeks (late October/early November), but although we haven't quite pinned down the date, we wanted to make sure you knew we have a celebration on the way. As soon as we have the details they will be shared here, on the Kiva Blog, so keep your eyes peeled as we will be asking guests to RSVP.
All four organizations are innovative models that have sprung from this same desire - that through collaboration we can create radical change! Together, we will share the underlying story of Kiva's milestone and the global inspiration it has created through pioneering community building for social change. YOU have played a critical role in helping to make this all possible and we're excited to celebrate with you! For those who are unable to physically attend our birthday party in Berkeley, but still wish to participate, we invite you to join our celebration in spirit on Facebook here!
Kiva staff 2006
Kiva staff 2009
Kiva Graduates 49 New Kiva Fellows
By Friday of last week, we had graduated the group as official Kiva Fellows to be deployed to locations all around the globe, including among others Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Palestine, Peru and the Philippines.
Over the coming weeks and months you can keep up with this group of Kiva Fellows by reading their blogs on Kiva Stories from the Field. And for a "Who's Who" of this group of Fellows, keep your eye on the Kiva Fellows Bio page to learn more about this inspiring group of individuals pursuing a path of service while helping Kiva to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.
The Kiva Fellowship Program attracts a creative bunch as we've seen in the past with Fistful of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva Loan (also in French and Spanish), KivaVision, a Typical Day in the Life of a Kenyan Woman and the first ever Kiva comic book.
If you'd like to consider being a Kiva Fellow yourself, applications have closed for the January 2010 class, however you can apply for the 2010 summer class. Click here for details.
Yola matches your Kiva loans!
Thanks to Yola.com, Kiva will have a presence at SOCAP09 this week and we’re thrilled about the opportunity!
Kiva is proudly partnering with both Yola.com and ACCION USA to help talented entrepreneurs get online and grow their businesses. Since 2007, Yola has helped more than 2 million people build websites to grow their businesses and achieve their social goals. And now, with support from ACCION USA, Kiva entrepreneurs will benefit from their service! 
To celebrate this partnership, Yola will be matching all loans made on their Kiva Lending Team – up to $10,000 – between now and the end of SOCAP09 (Sept 1-3). And we want to invite you, as part of Kiva’s growing community, to take part in this matching program! Please go to yola.com/kiva.html to learn more.
For more information on the conference this week, check out the SOCAP09 website here.
Introducing Kiva's Lending Team Playbook!
Kiva’s Community Outreach Team is thrilled to announce the recent release of the Lending Team Playbook, spearheaded by Kiva Interns, Colette Kessler (content) and Hannah Day (design)! A huge thanks goes out to all contributors, including star lending team captains, KivaFriends.org, and other committed volunteers.
The Playbook is a step-by-step guide on how to deepen your involvement with Kiva by engaging your communities. While it was created primarily for Lending Team Captains, we encourage all Kiva users to look to it for inspiration! The Playbook will show you how you can help raise awareness on Kiva, on the Internet, and in the world beyond your doorstep.
If you don’t yet have your own Lending Team, consider starting one today by clicking here! The Playbook can act as your guide to building a strong team and bringing Kiva to life for your family and friends. For any questions about the Playbook or Lending Teams that you can’t find on the website, feel free to contact the Community Outreach Team at kivacommunity@gmail.com
Changes to Interest Rates
Recap on Interest Rates
If you're new to Kiva, let us break it down for you like this:
1. When you make a loan to a Kiva entrepreneur, 100% of your loan funds are received by Kiva.
2. Kiva then passes 100% of your loan funds to the Field Partner (microfinance institution on the ground that Kiva has partnered with)
3. The Field Partner passes 100% of your loan funds on to the entrepreneur
4. When the entrepreneur repays the loan, the repay the principal loan amount (this is the amount listed on the Kiva website) plus interest to the Field Partner
5. The Field Partner passes the principal loan amount to Kiva
6. Kiva passes the principal loan amount back to all lenders who contributed to the loan.
Why do Kiva's Field Partners charge interest to the entrepreneurs?
Each Field Partner is an organization with staff and operational expenses, including the cost of processing each loan application, collecting loan repayments, and generally running a microfinance institution. In the same way that you or I would pay interest to a local bank that we loaned from, Kiva entrepreneurs pay interest to the microfinance institution that facilitated their loan. (Note: Kiva Field Partners don't pay any interest to on the debt capital they receive from Kiva Lenders which does reduce their cost of capital; however it doesn't reduce their many other costs associated with lending and posting loan requests to Kiva's website.)
The interest rate charged to Kiva entrepreneurs is very important to everyone involved in Kiva:
- Kiva will not partner with microfinance institutions whose interest rates, we believe, conflict with our social mission. Before partnering with any microfinance institution, we examine their interest rate as part of our due diligence, to ensure it is fair for the services provided given the region they are operating (for example some microfinance institutions couple business training with loans, which inflates their interest rate, or operate in areas where significant taxes are imposed, which also inflates their interest rate.)
- Many Kiva Lenders want to ensure that they are making their Kiva Loans through microfinance institutions that charge an interest rate that they feel comfortable with.
- Kiva Entrepreneurs need to be sure that the interest rate they are being charged is something they can afford.
- Kiva Field Partners need to charge an interest rate that will ensure their long-term sustainability and cover their operating costs, and not leave them operating at a loss.
OK, so what's new about Interest Rates?
We're currently working on better reporting of the actual costs that Kiva entrepreneurs pay to Kiva Field Partners.
While reporting the costs to Kiva entrepreneurs might seem simple - just by listing the interest rate - it is actually more complicated than that. In the same way that loans you or I access from a bank have fees associated with them, loans through microfinance institutions often have a fee in addition to the interest rate. Also, an interest rate on a loan might differ according to the length of the loan - so a 6 month loan might have a higher interest rate than a 9 month loan. This can make it difficult to list an interest rate on the Kiva website which is truly representative of the actual cost to the Kiva entrepreneur.
Commitment to transparency is a fundamental philosophy at Kiva, and it is very important to us that Kiva Lenders can easily discover the cost of each loan to Kiva entrepreneurs.
How will the Interest Rate change?
We are going to replace reporting the Interest Rate, with reporting the Portfolio Yield. This is much more than a name change - it's a different number altogether.
The Portfolio Yield is defined as all interest and fees paid by entrepreneurs to the Field Partner divided by the average portfolio outstanding during any given year. That would give a more accurate representation of the cost to each borrower of a loan from that portfolio of loans through that microfinance institution, both by including fees paid (not just interest paid), and by annualizing the interest rate.
Is that the only change?
No. Until now we have offered the local money lender interest rate as a comparison for each Field Partner's interest rate, so that Kiva Lenders can compare costs of different lending options available to Kiva entrepreneurs.
We will be replacing the local money lender interest rate with the average interest rate and fees charged by MFI peers in the country. We believe this will give Kiva Lenders a much more accurate comparison when considering the costs associated with loans through any Kiva Field Partner.
When will these changes take place?
These changes are live on Kiva right now. You can see the Portfolio Yield for any Field Partner here.
Where can I learn more?
To learn about this change, click on our Help Center, selet "Our Field Partners" and then "Interest Rates".
Kiva's commitment to transparency is one of our highest priorities, and we hope these changes both demonstrate this commitment, as well as provide informative and useful information to the Kiva community.
Some Loans May Look a Little Different
One word you’ll constantly hear around the Kiva office is “efficiency.” It’s a key theme at Kiva because the more efficient we can be, the more loans can get funded on the website, and the more we can achieve our social mission.
We’re going to try an experiment in the coming weeks: we’ll be allowing some loan requests to be posted to the website without an English translation.
How does this help Kiva be more efficient? There is a cost to having every loan request translated to English. While Kiva doesn’t pay outright for the translations (each translation is done by a team of hundreds of amazing volunteers!) it is a process that needs to be managed internally at Kiva. As more and more loan requests arrive at Kiva, we are looking to manage our growing volunteer team more and more efficiently. What does this means for the non-translated loans? The loans that are allowed to be posted without translation will not be in English. Lenders who understand these non-English languages will be unaffected, but if you don’t understand these languages you might look up an online translation service like Google Translator (http://translate.google.com/) or Babel Fish (http://babelfish.yahoo.com/ ) to help you understand the loan request. Or you might choose not to lend to this entrepreneur.
What happens now? We’ll be analyzing what happens with the non-translated loans to see if they are funded at the same rate, faster, or slower, than translated loan requests, as well as collecting information from lenders on how this impacts their experience on the website. After the experiment we’ll decide if this is an approach we might continue..
If you have any feedback or comments on this experiment, please write to contactus@kiva.org and let us know what you think.
Looking for a Volunteer Web Developer!
Kiva High School is a national network of high school students, and their respective chapters, unified by a belief that poverty can be alleviated and that microfinance is an effective tool to achieve this end. Students organize chapters of Kiva High School to join with like-minded students in their community and around the country to raise money to battle poverty, not with sympathy, but with business transactions rooted in mutual dignity.
As the Kiva High School Program is still in the early stages of development, we are looking to revamp our current website into something more resourceful for our users! So if you are a web developer who is committed, has some time to give, and is interested in making our vision a reality, this could be the perfect project for you!
If you'd like to learn more about this opportunity, please email Co-Founder and National Director of Kiva High School, Parth Shah, at parth@kiva.org.
Kiva launches in Armenia!
Last week, at long last, Kiva launched in Armenia with our first new partner in the country: Nor Horizon Universal Credit Organization. The first loan for Gohar Alikhanyan, a 49-year old widow who runs a fruit stand in the capital city, was funded within hours. More loans from Nor Horizon will be up on the site very soon, keep checking back on the site!
To tell you a little bit about Nor Horizon, the organization was originally founded by OXFAM Great Britain. The organization's mission is to provide high-quality business development services to enterprising individuals and small-scale businesses in underserved rural and urban areas. Nor Horizon works to increase the ability of poor people to engage in productive activities and generate secure livelihoods, ensure community development, and facilitate refugee integration with the local population. Nor Horizon is a small organization with close, personal relationships with its 2,000+ clients. For more information about Nor Horizon, visit the partner page here.
Please welcome Nor Horizon to Kiva and keep an eye out for more loans from this great new partner! And, thank you for supporting entrepreneurs in Armenia and around the world!
Join Kiva at SOCAP09!
Social enterprise and innovation is on everyone's mind these days. The big question is how to figure out how to drive money towards it. Kiva was one of the first to bring attention to this trend and the SOCAP conference was the first of its kind to bring people together to talk about it.
SOCAP09 is a gathering of the world's top social innovators held on September 1-3rd, 2009 at The Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. Last year at SOCAP08, over 600 attendees from 26 countries came to discover the landscape of the social capital marketplace. This year, members of the administration and key players from the public and private sector will explore new strategies for success in the changing financial world. Premal Shah, Kiva’s President, is onboard to speak on a panel on "Community Driven Change."
Kiva is also linking up with Yola.com to serve as co-sponsors of the event. We're looking forward to the chance to participate in this conference for the second year running and hope to bring Kiva folks along.
And even better, there is a 30% discount for our networks using the code "KA30." So, register here by August 21st to take advantage of this offer! We hope to see you at SOCAP09!
July: 2nd biggest month of lending ever!
February $3,828,825.00
March $4,282,625.00
April $4,487,875.00
May $4,643,100.00
June $4,909,050.00
What an incredible five months! While we were hoping this might continue Titanic-style (we think big at Kiva), July didn't beat June's incredible record of over $4.9 million loaned. However, July did beat our previous record, from May, and at $4,687,250 loaned July is now the second biggest month of lending ever!
You know what this means... we're yet to break $5 million loaned in one month!!!
So, if you have some friends you haven't invited to Kiva, or a birthday coming up, or even some Kiva Credit sitting unused in your Kiva Account - you know what to do! Send your friends over to Kiva, ask your family to get you a Kiva Gift Certificate this year, and spend that unused Kiva Credit!
Can we lend more than $5 million this month?
Kiva Partner Nau's Grant 4 Change
They're shifting the focus of the grant each year, but this year, Nau is dedicating it to those who move in the spirit of the Nau Collective. Nominees consist of:
- ATHLETES who are challenging assumptions about what it means to move through the world.
- ARTISTS, designers or other creatives who are moved to design better solutions to the world’s greatest problems.
- ACTIVISTS who are seeding positive change in their communities, and moving others to do the same.
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