When Aditi and I arrived in Busia, dust-splayed and
weather-beaten on the shared backseat of a boda
boda, we did not look like your average tourists.
The midday sun was at its height, and as we throttled down
miles of dusty country roads, the wind kicked up streaks of earth that colored my
clothes red and coursed through my hair. Sitting on the very back of the
motorbike, with Aditi sandwiched in-between me and the driver, I grasped for
the metal bar behind me with one hand, and with the other, waved at an
ever-evolving panorama of fruit sellers, truck drivers and playing children. The looks I got in return were bewildered at best -- no one was quite sure how to place me.
Up to that point, I had been living in Kenya’s foreigner-saturated
capital city of Nairobi for three weeks and had gotten used to a certain indifference
at my presence. Few, if any, passerby on the street stopped to take a second
look, and there was hardly any uproar at my belabored crawling into a crowded matatu with a cabin-full of locals. But
out in Western Kenya -- a stone’s throw from the Ugandan border -- in a place
that sees a negligible share of foreign visitors, Aditi and I were the only
other mzungu that we saw during our
two days in Busia.
The four women that we had
traveled over 300 miles to visit in the border town were all registered
community nurses who own and operate their own clinics. All of them were
recipients of Kiva Zip loans, small loans of $125 lent by individuals from
around the world that the nurses used to grow their businesses. But the reason
that Aditi and I were in Busia was not to disperse the loans, nor was it to
collect repayments. We weren’t educating on Kiva policies or training new
borrowers on the Zip model. In fact, it was quite the opposite; we were the
ones taking notes.
“When the government hospitals
run out of malaria drugs, we are the only place people can go,” Fosca told me, a
mother of seven and a widow of twenty years. I was sitting in the reception
area of her clinic in the small rural town of Funyula, filling out a borrower
verification form and talking fast so as not to take too much time away from
her patients. Fosca was soft-spoken and amazingly resilient; she runs two businesses in addition to her clinic, a farm where she sells beans and corn and
a brickmaking kiln. More impressive still, she singlehandedly put all seven of
her kids through college. (“My last one is in university now,” she corrected
me, “so don’t congratulate me just yet.”).
Fosca holding the visitor's book we would later sign.
Like many of the nurses I spoke with, Fosca used the Zip loan to stock up on extra supplies for her clinic. One of her competitive advantages has recently been in stockpiling malaria drugs. They are becoming increasingly scarce in the town and she builds her customer base by ensuring that sick patients can come to her and get the drugs that they need when they are not available elsewhere. She said, however, that this would not have been possible without a loan from Kiva.
“Without the loan, things would
be like they were before,” she said, “slow.” Her patient base has increased
from five a day to close to ten, and she has hired a new nurse to support the growing
business. She estimates that profits have increased four-fold since taking out
the loan.
But microfinance loans, for many
of the nurses I met, were nothing revolutionary. Almost all of them had some
experience with borrowing, whether it was through banks, relatives, or informal
groups. But not all of them would do it again.
“I had a bad experience with a
bank loan,” Janet told me, a nurse in the town of Nambale who began her clinic
out of her home back in 2006. “The interest rates are just too high.” At upwards of 40% interest, bank loans in Kenya are a huge barrier for small business
owners, especially for those at the bottom of the pyramid. Kiva Zip specifically targets individuals who are deemed “too risky”
for traditional microfinance and provides them with capital that would otherwise
be unavailable to them.
Janet at her clinic in Nambale.
“I was happy to get the loan
because I no longer have to ask my children for money to buy items for my
clinic,” she told Aditi and me. She said that after she finishes repaying her current loan, she wants
to use her next loan to expand the physical capacity of her clinic with an
extension. But this was not just a future pipedream.
Janet led us out of her clinic
and took us into the newly vacant adjacent building, which she had recently put a down
payment on. She had already started converting it, outfitting the walls with
large floor-to-ceiling shelves and installing a large
glass counter in the front.
“This will be the pharmacy,” she
told me. Her dream is to eventually own the entire property on which her clinic sits – not
simply rent it – to ensure that the clinic will live on beyond her, and that the
government won’t be able to take it away from the community after she is gone. Janet,
like many of the Kenyans I’ve met – and like many of the Americans I know too –
doesn’t entirely trust her government.
But it’s not just trust in the government;
trust in one’s community is tricky too. On one hand, it is risky to depend
on other people, but on the other, it is sometimes the only option that
entrepreneurs have. Elizabeth, who used her loan to buy a glucometer to expand
the services that her clinic offers, takes part in what is known as “table
banking” with three women’s groups in her community.
“They fund better than bank loans
and only charge 10% interest,” she insisted. But she also acknowledged the
dangers. In table banking, a large group of individuals pools its money and each
week rotates who it is sent home with. It is a useful system, but the model
only works if members consistently contribute to the pool even after they’ve cashed
out their large sum. “If someone doesn’t pay up, everyone is responsible,”
Elizabeth told me. “And that’s trouble for everyone.”
Elizabeth with the glucometer that she bought with her Kiva loan.
But as I talked with the nurses about their experience with Kiva, one nagging question still remained. Not only were Aditi and I clearly outsiders to the town, we were also foreigners. If distrust is already so pervasive among Kenyan nationals, locals within the community, and even close confidantes, than what reason whatsoever did these women have to trust us?
The answer came to me at lunch at
a local restaurant in the town of Bumala, where Aditi and I visited Mary, the
first of the nurses in Busia to take out a Kiva loan. She bore the risk for the
loan and it was only through her diligence and ability to pay it back on time that the
other nurses could be endorsed as borrowers. At the heart of Kiva’s model is an
underlying philosophy of trust – new borrowers must depend on the reliability
of their predecessors to have the opportunity to take out a new loan, and in
turn, those predecessors are able to graduate to higher loan amounts. When we
went to visit Mary, she was already paying back her second loan, this one for $250.
Mary with her daughter and granddaughter at their home in Bumala.
As volunteers, what we lose in
credibility due to not being salaried employees we gain by the very nature of
our presence – our commitment to this experience means that we believe in Kiva’s
mission, and more importantly, that we care deeply about the people that Kiva
supports. In that way, we embody that philosophy of trust, establishing a
crucial link between lenders and borrowers who may never meet in person, but in
some small way can learn more about each other through us. More than anything else,
it was the visit to see those nurses, to see first-hand how the Zip loan had
changed their lives, that really convinced me of that.
When I saw Mary, I showed her the
profiles of all the lenders that had contributed to her loan, and her face lit
up. I was surprised to learn that none of the nurses I visited had ever seen
their public profile online. None of them had regular access to the internet
and on average they only checked their personal emails about once a month. But messages
from Kiva, like the loans themselves, are delivered right to the borrower’s
phones, and Mary was sent a message every time a new lender contributed to her
loan. Likewise, borrowers are able to communicate directly with lenders by
sending a text.
“I remember sending Trevor a
message when he funded my loan,” Mary said. “I was so grateful for that.”
Many of the nurses were amazed at
the fact that we had self-financed our own experience as volunteers with Kiva to
make visits to places like Busia. I asked Mary if she thought it was strange
that we had come to visit her – that despite having already received two loans
from Kiva, we were the first representatives from the organization that she had
physically met.
“It’s just like the lenders,” she
responded, still staring at the faces of the thirteen individuals who trusted her to repay her loan. “But seeing your faces in person is like an added bonus.”
Near the end of our visit, Mary quickly shuffled us into her office and closed the door. Her eyes widened and she lowered her voice, like we were fifth-graders at a sleepover, and she was about to tell us a secret.
“My kids will never believe you came here,” Mary said,
flashing a wide grin. “You’ll have to sign my visitor’s book for proof.” At
that point it had become a familiar routine; Aditi and I signed the visitor’s
book of each of the four nurses that we came to visit. Each time I tried to write
something different. During the visit, I asked them countless questions
about how the Zip loan impacted their lives that, when I left, I wanted to let
them know how much they had made an impact on me.
When I handed the book back to Mary and turned toward the boda boda driver waiting outside, I thought
about leaving Kenya in six weeks, about the stories I would tell friends back
home of the nurses I had met in Busia. I wondered if they would believe me
either.
*
This post is cross-listed on the Kiva Fellows Blog.