What Is Kiva & Who are the Happy Kiva Lenders?

[mjakes20]

Your money goes such a long way. Just start off with a 25 dollar loan. Usually the borrower ends successfully and you get paid back. Lend again, again, and again, all with the same money.

[CybershulDotCom]

It is rather cheeky to deride people who disagree with you as "grumpy", but then, you live in the USA so I will assume you are oblivious as to why loaning to USA based borrowers is controversial.

[pollybanks]

@Rohand

The reality is, local microfinance institutes (including all of the microfinance institutes that Kiva funds) require money to meet their operating costs. These costs can be quite extensive when you consider that staff from these institutes have to travel long distances to lend money and then to revisit the borrower regularly (usually every month) to collect repayments. The only real alternative for borrowers is to take loans from loan sharks- at around 200% interest rates.

[bashas]

Great great video!! congratulations Paul, this definitely helps promoting the idea.

[rohand01]

One thing Paul forgot to mentioned in his video. When you lend money to kiva, kiva then give the money to kiva microfinance partner who charge our poor borrowers that we're trying to help high interest rate (on average 37%). Now by lending to this micro finance company, are we helping the poor or we helping the microfinance company to be the local mafia?

[russelldad]

Hi rohand01,

I hadn't heard anything like that, but I'm open to new information. Can you post a link to your source?

Paul

[zordah]

Yes the partners charge interest to the borrowers but they have costs that need covering too in order to keep it all working. And it's a lot better than the local moneylenders that can charge 300% on their loans!

Kiva also says in their knowledgebase "Our Field Partners are free to charge interest, but Kiva will not partner with an organization that charges exorbitant interest rates. We also require Field Partners to fully disclose their interest rates."

[zarzegas]

@russelldad I'll tell you where to go, to to kiva's site, scroll down and under "Using kiva" click on "field partners" click on the very first one "Asociación Arariwa Peru" and scroll all the way to the bottom. in the table labeled Borrowing Cost Comparison (based on 2009 data) you will see that this particular partner's interest rate is 45.10% while the average for all kiva field partners is 37.06% so there is your source. Thanks for keeping an open mind!

[ownedzao]

@rohand01 Hello Rohand.

You probably live in a rich country, and don't understand the reality of Poor countries.

I live in Brazil (really better than Zimbabwe or Peru, or other countries from Kiva), and here the interest for ME, a government employee with a pretty good wage, can reach about 30% monthly.

Imagine the interest to people without houses, jobs or stabilished bussiness, living in unstable countries like Honduras.

Read more before saying that Kiva isn't a great organization.

[elizabethwest14]

Great video, Paul!

[gmasci12]

Thanks Paul, this is awesome! It put a smile on my face :)

[drjimmy42]

I felt like I was flying through the universe of collaborative lending. Nice video!

[brookebkk]

Awesome!! Thanks, Paul!!

[sshewan]

Great Video!! Love it!! Well done!

Susan

Member of the Happy Kiva Lenders Team :-)