The people I come in contact with.
This is how Kiva works. You give a loan. The loans goes through Kiva. It goes to an microfinance institution. They give money to a lender.
I will working with a microfinance institution Guatemala City (FAPE) to help them better work with Kiva, and get more loans to those who need them. Most of what I will be doing is helping FAPE understand the way Kiva works better, and helping them to post more loans on Kiva’s websites. The barriers will be cultural, financial, temporal, and who-knows-al.
Another important job of mine is maintaining transparency. I am going to work with FAPE to help them put more information on Kiva’s website on exactly who their borrowers are. In this role, I will be meeting and interview the individual burrowers.
A social critic named David Rodman has recently written about Kiva, critisizing its transparency. Among his points, many of which I take issue with, he takes aim at the Kiva Fellows program and the process of interviewing borrowers:
The Fellows program page contains a picture (right) of a Fellow videotaping an interview with a borrower in Sierra Leone. The young American is viewing the man through the lens of a camera that probably cost more than the Sierra Leone’s GDP/capita, having arrived their on airfare priced even higher. He is having a good experience. The borrower may not have heard of Kiva until shortly before this interview. Chiefly on his mind must be how to protect his access to capital, which means saying whatever it is he thinks the young American wants to hear. Probably he understands that he must talk about his enterprise even if he used the loan for to pay for his father’s funeral. Probably he understands that he should accentuate the positive to come off to the extent he can as the “entrepreneur empowered to lift himself out of poverty,” to paraphrase Kiva’s old home page. He is to play a role. Though probably older and wiser, he is less lucky in life, so he is the object.
Many current fellows have chosen to respond to Mr. Rodman directly on his post, but I did not feel moved to engage him in conversation. He has two arguments that particularly irk me: that borrower should “accentuate the positive” and that he is an object. There is no doubt that Kiva loves put success stories on their website, and they maybe even highlight those, but at no point is there any insinuation to any borrower that he/she should stretch the truth so as to make themselves more marketable. Real life is much more interesting, and inspiring than false stories. Furthermore, a search of the Kiva Fellows Blog will reveal that Kiva does not shy away from telling stories of despair. The Fellows Blog only exemplifies Kiva’s mission of telling the being transparent, and sharing stories that help bridge different cultures. Borrowers have a choice of being on Kiva or not, and as one fellow points out, don’t a lot of people get pride from sharing passions an anecdotes from their lives. So maybe the man in Sierra Leone is an object, and maybe the borrowers are objects, but certainly not exploited objects being demeaned for Kiva’s well being. This is not poverty pornography, nor is it a feel-good-story factory. It’s just life. And there’s nothing more inspiring than that.
For the full discourse, David Rodman wrote a critique, to which Matt Flannery, CEO and co-founder of Kiva, wrote a response, to which David Responded with his most current blog.
