My Kiva Goals for 2019
Back in 2016, I was introduced to Kiva for the first time by Jordan Lynn’s father Nick. I was immediately hooked on the idea of being able to help people from all over the world with microloans.
Kiva is an international nonprofit, founded in 2005 and based in San Francisco, with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. We celebrate and support people looking to create a better future for themselves, their families and their communities.
With as little as $25 you can really make an impact in someone else’s life, either by helping them get access to clean water, energy, and food, or by becoming an active part of their business idea.
It’s important to mention that every dollar you lend to Kiva is used to fund only the loan(s) you have chosen. In order to cover operational costs, Kiva relies on optional donations as well as money coming directly from grants and sponsors. If you want to know more about how Kiva works you can check “the journey of a Kiva loan.”
Since I joined this amazing initiative, I’ve made five loans to four different people in Kenya, Colombia, and El Salvador. Those loans have been distributed among the Services (40%), Education (20%), Entertainment (20%), and Food (20%) sectors, mostly to women (80%).
This year I’ve made sure I write down in my personal OKRs a couple of specific objectives to “Loan $25 to at least 6 new projects on Kiva by the end of the year,” and “Promote each Kiva project I back up, individually, once invested.”
Even though this is still a modest investment, it represents a significant increase in my commitment to the platform and its borrowers. A commitment that comes not only in the form of loans and donations (Kiva will give back money to loan to a project if you participate in their donations campaign), but also in the form of awareness-generation efforts directed to my personal and professional network.
I have to confess that my previous attempts to recruit people for the platform have not at all been successful. I’ve invited hundreds of friends and family members — the ones I believe could be in a position to spare $25, which excludes most of my close ones still living back home — and only one person has accepted my invitation (thank you Maria Del Carmen!). That being said, the challenge of permeating people’s overstimulated lives, and trying to get them to join my quest, is exactly one of the reasons why putting down some serious effort to dig into my network is worth a separate entry in my OKRs.
I sincerely believe an organization like Kiva gives us (those who are not wealthy in the western sense of it, but earn more than $32/day) a chance to help people still struggling to improve basic aspects of their lives, kick-start business, or impact their own communities by leveraging technology and education.
Since 2005, Kiva’s global community of 1.7 million lenders has crowdfunded more than $1.2 billion in microloans to 3 million borrowers in more than 80 countries.
Kiva is full of amazing and inspiring stories from all over the world. They have built a platform that makes it extremely easy for most of us to pay it forward, connect with other human beings, and spread as little or as much of our own resources as we want.
This 2019 I’ll step up my (microloans) game with Kiva, and I’ll evaluate the results at the end of the year to adjust, as I see fit, for 2020. I’ll also reach out to more people, old and new, in order to create awareness and hopefully connect with like-minded individuals looking forward to ignite the lending spark.
Kiva’s repayment rate is 96.8%. Perhaps this time I’ll start with that :-)
Thank for reading,
Juan.
