We hope that you make a this a special day to remember your mothers and any other women who cared for you like a mother!
P.S. A Kiva Card makes a great last-minute gift!
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Mary, far left, with the Sisal Sisters borrower group in Kakuyuni, near Tala, Kenya
The second day I was in Kenya I had the good fortune to spend the day with KADET staff profiling the top loan officer at the agency, Mary Ngenya, who works in the Tala region. Mary is considered THE BEST of approximately 80 loan officers in the entire organization which has offices all over Kenya; she manages one of the largest loan portfolios in the organization and in the six years since she’s been with KADET, her...
Borrower verifications can be the most rewarding part of a Kiva Fellow’s time in the field, they can also be the most challenging. Traveling on your own for days through an unfamiliar part of the country, on less than ideal roads, bridges and buses can deflate even the strongest Kiva cheerleaders. I would be lying if I did not say that the process of the BV [excluding meeting the borrowers] dropped me into an occasional trough of despair.
... Continue Reading >>Jenny Jin, KF11 – Kenya, KADET
I’m a whimsical documentarian, and the video clips that I find on my computer consistently surprise me if they turn out to have captured something. After officially ending my fellowship this past week, while waiting for my flight back to San Francisco and missing Kenya already, I was idly flicking through my computer files and I found a pretty excellent clip that I wanted to share with the Kiva community.
This clip features Dorice explaining what Kiva is to a 15-member group of KADET clients in Western Kenya. This was...
Continue Reading >>Jenny Jin, KF 11- Kenya, KADET
In Kabarnet, a town situated on the mountain tops of Western Kenya, I spent a day with Irene, a credit officer, to meet KADET’s client groups living in this area. At the end of the day, I was tired but happy from all the people I had the pleasure to meet. One young woman, at the young age of 28, was earning less than $2 a day and supporting 8 orphan children in addition to her own two kids. Wow!
Towards the end of our last meeting with a women’s group, one of the clients, Albina, gave an impromptu...
Continue Reading >>In the first weeks as a Kiva Fellow with KADET, I learned that the Kenyan microfinance organization focused on serving rural small entrepreneurs, both men and women. But it wasn’t until I got into the field and met the clients that I began to have a richer understanding of the entrepreneurs that KADET was serving. The clients were infallibly gracious in their welcome, and shared details of their businesses, their family life, and invited me into their homes and...
Jenny Jin, KF11
This past weekend I had the opportunity to check out one of KADET’s new loan products: solar loans!
A backstory of how solar is coming on strong in Kenya
Many of KADET’s borrowers live in off-grid rural areas without access to electricity or gas. Charcoal and kerosene are still the most common form of power for average Kenyans to power their homes and businesses. Indeed, a number of KADET borrowers that I’ve met have small businesses of selling charcoal.
In recent years, several...
Continue Reading >>Dorice is the newest Kiva assistant coordinator for KADET, the Kenyan microfinance partner that I’ve been working with through my Kiva Fellowship. Dorice is new to KADET’s Kiva Operations team but she’s been with KADET for years, and has been a real source of inspiration and fun for the staff and past Kiva Fellows with her passion to help others and her social personality. A week ago, I asked Dorice whether she’d be interested to introduce herself to the Kiva community on the blog, and she wrote a...
By Maia Pelleg, KF9, Kenya Agency for the Development of Enterprise and Technology (KADET)
'This video was filmed in response to the following interaction I had with a borrower group outside of Nairobi, Kenya…
“Habari. Nina itwa Maia,” I practice saying as I walk into my first group meeting of the day. A KADET credit officer named Gachi,and I are visiting Kiva...
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