By Rose Larsen, KF19 Colombia, with excerpts provided by Wesley Schrock, KF19 Honduras, and Luan Nio, KF18 Nicaragua/KF19 United States

Loan officers are the hidden heroes behind the Kiva model.

Lenders, borrowers, Kiva staff and Kiva fellows all show their beautiful faces somewhere on Kiva.org, and while Kiva’s field partners have profiles of their own, there is little explanation or clarity behind who actually, physically, goes to the clients’ businesses, evaluates their requests, delivers loans and picks up repayments (hint: it’s loan officers!)....

This Thanksgiving I may not be eating turkey and pumpkin pie, but I have many reasons to be thankful. I am grateful to work with two Kiva Partners in Togo and Benin who go above and beyond to provide services to poor clients who previously had no access to formal credit.

Reaching the Poorest of the Poor...

Let me introduce you to Carmen, Maria and Lina, from the group “Siempre 10 Al Progreso”. They live in the same neighbourhood in Lima, Peru’s capital, so they have known each other for a long time. But since 2008 they share more than their neighbourhood: they belong to the same “alcancía comunal”.

An “alcancía comunal”, sometimes referred to as a communal bank, is a self-organized group of borrowers who guarantee each other’s loans. Most of the loans at Edaprospo, the organization where I am placed, are...

Alice Reeves | KF18 | Kosovo & Albania

Pop Quiz!  What do you think about when you think of Albania?   On asking some friends before leaving home, the answers that came back varied wildly: ‘economy based on pyramid selling’, ‘blood feud’, ‘one bunker per family policy’.  Preconceptions are interesting things….

Being a Kiva fellow certainly challenges any preconceptions you forget to leave at home, never more so than in the rapidly developing Balkans.  It also opens your eyes to the real economic challenges that lie in Europe’s mountainous south eastern...