Archive for the ‘micro-lending’ Category

Behind the Apps: Humsara (Kiva Lender badge in Flash)

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 by Halle Tecco

We were excited to see a new app roll out this week– created by developer Amol Mittal from San Francisco.  When Amol noticed that the current Kiva badges were geared towards specific publishing platforms (namely wordpress and facebook), he decided to create something that could work for multiple platforms.humsara1

Humsara makes it easy to embed your personal loan portfolio in a slide-show format directly into your website.  Let’s learn more about the developer behind the app:

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Amol Mittal.  I’m a freelance designer/developer specializing in Flash applications living in the San Francisco bay area, CA.  As far as hobbies are concerned, I’m
a foodie, which is why I’m glad I live in the bay area.  Otherwise I enjoy hiking, user interface design, movies.

How did you get involved with developing apps for Kiva?

I just love what Kiva does.  At first when I heard about it and went on to make my first loan, in my mind I was still thinking of Kiva as a “donation/charity” website. Some time passed and then came the timefor my first repayment. The moment I got the email of my first loan repayment, I then realized what Kiva has accomplished; and that is they have made a loan feel like charity.  I don’t lose any money, I get it all (mostly) back eventually.  When I learnt that a developer API had been released, I just felt compelled to try building something.  Build something for a worthy cause and get some development practice at the same time.

What are you plans for the future?

I have a few ideas that I would like to try out.  Most of these ideas are centered around making Kiva’s data more accessible, and providing users with tools that make it much
easier to see how kiva works.  One Idea is a Loan Timeline Visualizer; which would let the user see exactly when and where the money came from and went to. I also am considering writing an api wrapper in Actionscript 3 for Flash developers.

Posted in behind the apps, events, micro-lending | 1 Comment »

Measuring the Social Impact of Kiva Loans

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 by Halle Tecco

If you were going to rate Kiva loans by their potential social impact, what data would you look at?

The team behind Kivuntu, came up with an interesting formula combining Kiva data (loan amount, number of borrowers, and duration) with country data (GDP per capita). Through this formula, their website produces a daily ranking of what they consider the 2o highest-impact loans.  This is based on the assumption that the larger the loan with respect to GDP, the greater the business opportunity and cash flow of the business.  They also assume that shorter loans provide greater social good, as the money will be re-paid and re-loaned to other entrepreneurs.

While this site and concept are just beginning, the team plans to refine the formula and add a searchable database with scores of all borrowers.

Attempting to answer the forward-looking question of  which loan will have the greatest social impact is much more challenging than looking back at the $70 million that has been loaned to over 166,000 entrepreneurs on Kiva and deducing the net social impact. Each loan, on an individual level, includes a variety of  both predictable and unpredictible factors that dictates success.  And on top of that, each region has unique challenges from currency risk to corruption to seasonal economic fluctuations.   And even if you had all this data, how do we know what success looks like?

These are interesting questions, and the creation of this app signals that borrowers are hungry for a deeper credit/risk/impact measurement– beyond the current combination of “Field Partner Rating” and entrepreneur bio that is availbale.  Some questions I hear borrowers asking are: How will this loan benefit the entrepreneur and his or her community? Will there be job creation?  Is this an eco-friendly venture? What interest rate is the entrepreneur paying to the MFI?

So tell me, how would you measure the social impact of your loans?

Posted in apps, micro-lending | 4 Comments »

Kiva
  • © 2009 Kiva. All rights reserved.
  • Terms Of Service
  • Kiva is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.