I am in a shed out the back of a small bank branch near the bustling Kimironko market in Kigali, Rwanda. It is busy, dark and noisy. About 80 people mill around, chatting and making last-minute phone calls to see where missing group members are.

The moment we step under the palm thatched roof, it starts to drizzle. “You brought the rain!” jokes Mariluz, the borrower I have come to visit. Her home, in the northeastern corner of Bolivia, is a simple, 2-room set up, with the thatched roof covering the area that fronts it. 

As a Kiva Fellow in Southern Africa, I get to pursue that interest in my work with a company called iSchool that develops educational technology for primary school students and teachers in Zambia.

On June 20, 2017, Kiva launched the World Refugee Fund to match loans to refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) to help them rebuild their lives and create some stability. Traditional forms of finance are often out of reach for refugees, and as such supporting loans for this population is vital.

As I get ready to start a new chapter in Nairobi, Kenya with the Kiva Labs team, I can’t help but reminisce on the last 6 months abroad as a Kiva Fellow in the Philippines and Timor-Leste. Although it was not always easy to be on my own, I’ve grown so much as a person because of all the “Yeses” I reluctantly agreed to.

Full disclosure: This post is not about the actual mayor of Dar es Salaam, but rather a Kiva borrower named Samweli whom I had the pleasure of meeting, and the story behind his nickname, the “Mayor of Dar es Salaam.”

Albania has a gigantic, generous heart, and I found it last weekend in the country’s beautiful north. This is a love story. Perhaps not the typical kind of love story, but I promise it's still chock full of the real stuff.

Forced to go to Guinea in exile for 2 years during the civil war, he returned to his native country that stood almost in total chaos after a long decade of rebel war.

This story began with an unchaperoned borrower verification trip and ended up with a deep dive into the exciting social enterprise scene in Armenia.