Meeting Borrowers

One of the tasks I'm performing while I'm working here is to physically verify that the information about borrowers posted on Kiva's site is accurate and truthful. This involves randomly selecting ten borrowers and going to see them and ask them questions. Kiva's goal is to perform these verifications with all of their partners around the world (using Fellows like myself) at least once each year. I find this both impressive and admirable as it means mobilizing a lot of volunteers to a lot of remote places. I'm also admittedly biased.

And as mundane as the process sounds, it's the thing I've been most excited for so far. I get to meet borrowers and see their businesses. Providing credit to these people is at the core of what Kiva is trying to do.

Among the ten randomly selected borrowers, a bunch were in the city of Bo, Sierra Leone's second largest city, and Makeni, its fourth city. The cities are a couple hours inland from Freetown, "upcountry" as the inland areas are called. The travel was long and uncomfortable, but that's pretty much the bus from Boston to New York most of the time.

For each borrower visit, I went with the local loan officer who helped me find the borrower and then translate to Krio when needed. At first I think I just made the borrowers nervous -- I can only guess that when they saw their loan officer arriving with me, a "witeboi", it was a worrisome thing. The questions I had were really simple (their name, basic biographical info, loan amount, loan date, loan purpose) and I'll soon compare the borrowers' responses to the info supplied by the loaning institution. The biggest reason for these visits is for me to confirm that the people exist and that the loan amounts are correct. If not, a loaning institutions might make up names or amounts and fraudulently use the funds from Kiva for institutional operating costs.

But the best, "warm and fuzzy" part of the visits was showing the borrowers print outs of their borrower profile pages. In each instance I was greeted with huge smiles when I showed them their photo from the Kiva website and explained that a dozen people had helped fund their loan. Most of them sort of understood what Kiva meant before, but after seeing pictures of the people from around the world who contributed to their loans, each borrower was impressed, if not really touched.

++ Shameless plug: if you haven't made a loan on Kiva and have questions, send me a note. I'll tell you more about it. ++