Fellows Blog

Stories from the field

Fellows Blog Posts by morrisctm

Oct 8, 2009 MZ Mozambique

By Cameron Morris KF8, Mozambique

On Monday ten hours of arduous bus travel took me from Maputo to Johannesburg and brought a pretty definite end to my Kiva Fellowship. Before going to Mozambique I was easily amazed by wonky, academic models that sought to bring the end of poverty to the world. It didn’t take long to realize that those theories are exactly that, just theories that in reality cannot be easily applied. People are not merely numbers or statistics and their problems are not inputs into functions. Their problems are real and have voices. Voices that are...

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Sep 16, 2009 MZ Mozambique

By Cameron Morris, KF8 Mozambique

Microcredit operators, microbanks, and banks are the three primary designations for consumer facing financial institutions in Mozambique. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been spending some of my time assisting the Kiva portfolio team with MFI recruitment. I’ve met with a full range of financial institutions with executive directors as diverse as the populations they serve.

I would guess that currently the majority of Kiva’s...

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Sep 2, 2009 MZ Mozambique

By Cameron Morris-KF8, Mozambique

For the last week and a half I have been working out of the Hluvuku-Adsema office along the bustling Mozambique-Swaziland border in the town of Namaacha, Mozambique. Namaacha is nestled in the Libombo mountains, boasts a plenitude of colonial architecture and has extremely erratic weather (please believe that it gets mighty cold in Mozambique). During the near fortnight that I’ve been here I have been continually impressed by the ingenuity of...

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Aug 13, 2009 MZ Mozambique

By Cameron Morris KF8, Mozambique

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe, right? Well, yes and no. Although that text is lifted directly from the about us section of Kiva’s website it doesn’t tell the complete story. If your zeal for Kiva has lead you to spend late nights combing through Kiva loans you may have also noticed loans for housing, education, and personal use. Alas, how is building a home...

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Aug 3, 2009 KE Kenya

By Jaclyn Berfond, Laura Buhler, Alison Carlman, Joel Carlman and Cameron Morris

Last weekend the East African Kiva Fellows delegation descended upon the bustling streets of Kampala, Uganda and the banks of the Nile River for two days of intense knowledge transfer and mild revelry. We spent hours discussing the importance of data validity in performing operational cost analyses and tried to debunk the myth that OpenOffice does not properly save .csv files for uploading repayment information to PA2. We also had a little fun. We left Kampala feeling...

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Jul 9, 2009 MZ Mozambique

By Cameron Morris KF8, Mozambique

In San Francisco waking up on a Saturday morning and hitting the Noe Valley farmers market is always a good time. Organic, sustainably grown, local produce , grass-fed, free range meat, 30 something couples playing with their toddlers and quaint discussions with local farmers are just a few of the delights. I’ve got a particular soft spot for the ever-popular heirloom tomatoes, I even went so far as to cultivate my own last year.

How does the...

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Jun 26, 2009 MZ Mozambique

By Cameron Morris, KF8 – Mozambique

During Kiva Fellows training we were tasked with putting Kiva’s Mission statement into our own words. This gave us the opportunity to critically think about Kiva’s mission and to highlight aspects of the mission that we thought most important. I placed emphasis on Kiva’s use of technology to meet its goals. Having been in the field, Mozambique , for a little over a week I have been amazed by the creative leveraging of basic technologies by my MFI.

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