Kiva conducts regular, ongoing monitoring of all Field Partners, but only posts status updates here in response to relevant, major changes at the partner.

Partner description:

Jibu (meaning “solution” in Swahili) is a social enterprise tackling the drinking water and unemployment crises by training local workers to be successful social entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs, about half of whom are young women, are quickly expanding a network of locally-owned drinking water franchises in Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya. Each one provides affordable, safe and clean water to their underserved communities.

Jibu entrepreneurs are able to offer affordable, clean drinking water by setting up filtration systems tailored to each community, based on available water sources. Customers pay a bottle deposit and then exchange an empty bottle for a new, full bottle, avoiding any middleman markups.
 

A unique lending approach:

Jibu uses Kiva financing to provide credit to their franchise owners to purchase water bottle inventory. Franchises purchase bottle stock from Jibu corporate in order to grow and expand their distribution as each new customer needs to purchase a refillable water bottle to access Jibu’s clean drinking water. Kiva bottle inventory loans allow franchises to scale up their businesses immediately and save them from having to build a capital base from their own profits, which would slow growth. Loans are repaid from profits on bottle sales.