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Whose hand is that?
Humans are motivated by funny, funny things. Particularly competition. From the "letting the left hand know what the right hand is doing" department...
I meant to throw money at http://www.kiva.org/ over a year ago when I saw it in a magazine article on young innovators. The site lets you make microloans to people in developing parts of the world, and does all the difficult bits of verifying that their partner organizations are doing a good job. It's a wonderful idea.
I was angsting over which loans to invest in (overchoice!) and eventually accidentally closed the browser window and forgot all about it. Until yesterday when a webcomic feed mentioned the site, so I went back...
They have groups now. That means that you can use your donation to vote for a granfalloon of your choice, like the old SETI distributed computing game. That sounds like fun! I could be part of a group by doing something I want to do anyway! Belongingness! Feeling of tribal safety! What good sociologists they are! Let's go see what groups are out there...
http://www.kiva.org/community tells me that as of February 13, 2009, the top-donating group is Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious, holding their own above Team Obama and Kiva Christians. O.M.G.
I'm not usually very vocal about agnosticism. I don't feel like "ridding the world of superstition". But I am thrilled to see this flag waved, that people who say they can have a moral compass without a spiritual lodestone are putting their money where their mouths are. It's meaningless, statistically. If you add up the Christian groups in general, they got us whomped. But that doesn't change the sudden gleeful "We're Number One!" shock of it.
By the way, I was then torn between whether keeping them at #1 or trying to help bump GLBT up from 8th or 9th. I went with #1 because Kiva Christians is very motivated to keep up, so it's almost like donating twice! This is rivalry harnessed for the powers of good.
Anyway, competitive streak indulged, lending spree finally kicked past thought and into action. By what? Competition. Wanting someone to see not what I personally am doing, but what I-my-tribe is capable of.
Whatever gets the job done. Is there a group you'd like to bump? Lots to choose from. Or just do it because you've been meaning to anyway. Whatever gets the job done.
(How the money part works: If you want, you can pull your money back out when they pay it back, but you are of course strongly encouaraged to loop it back into a new loan. You do not earn interest. Given the average default rate, if you do it long enough you can expect to lose maybe 2.3%; about 1 in 40 loans default. Of $24mil completed loans, they've lost $0.5mil, total, ever.
To minimize risk, I put the minimum $25 on different loans so one default will never blow it all away. Edit to note: I'm learning individuals almost never default. To minimize risk, spread loans out over partner organizations. The vast majority of defaults come from an organization with dodgy bookkeeping slipping through Kiva's auditing net. I've now added a comment to this entry listing all default information EVER. It's really clear-cut. Diversify among partners. Update on how not to use their star ratings.)
I meant to throw money at http://www.kiva.org/ over a year ago when I saw it in a magazine article on young innovators. The site lets you make microloans to people in developing parts of the world, and does all the difficult bits of verifying that their partner organizations are doing a good job. It's a wonderful idea.
I was angsting over which loans to invest in (overchoice!) and eventually accidentally closed the browser window and forgot all about it. Until yesterday when a webcomic feed mentioned the site, so I went back...
They have groups now. That means that you can use your donation to vote for a granfalloon of your choice, like the old SETI distributed computing game. That sounds like fun! I could be part of a group by doing something I want to do anyway! Belongingness! Feeling of tribal safety! What good sociologists they are! Let's go see what groups are out there...
http://www.kiva.org/community tells me that as of February 13, 2009, the top-donating group is Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious, holding their own above Team Obama and Kiva Christians. O.M.G.
I'm not usually very vocal about agnosticism. I don't feel like "ridding the world of superstition". But I am thrilled to see this flag waved, that people who say they can have a moral compass without a spiritual lodestone are putting their money where their mouths are. It's meaningless, statistically. If you add up the Christian groups in general, they got us whomped. But that doesn't change the sudden gleeful "We're Number One!" shock of it.
By the way, I was then torn between whether keeping them at #1 or trying to help bump GLBT up from 8th or 9th. I went with #1 because Kiva Christians is very motivated to keep up, so it's almost like donating twice! This is rivalry harnessed for the powers of good.
Anyway, competitive streak indulged, lending spree finally kicked past thought and into action. By what? Competition. Wanting someone to see not what I personally am doing, but what I-my-tribe is capable of.
Whatever gets the job done. Is there a group you'd like to bump? Lots to choose from. Or just do it because you've been meaning to anyway. Whatever gets the job done.
(How the money part works: If you want, you can pull your money back out when they pay it back, but you are of course strongly encouaraged to loop it back into a new loan. You do not earn interest. Given the average default rate, if you do it long enough you can expect to lose maybe 2.3%; about 1 in 40 loans default. Of $24mil completed loans, they've lost $0.5mil, total, ever.
To minimize risk, I put the minimum $25 on different loans so one default will never blow it all away. Edit to note: I'm learning individuals almost never default. To minimize risk, spread loans out over partner organizations. The vast majority of defaults come from an organization with dodgy bookkeeping slipping through Kiva's auditing net. I've now added a comment to this entry listing all default information EVER. It's really clear-cut. Diversify among partners. Update on how not to use their star ratings.)
no subject
Overchoice! My solution.
Re: overchoice, I know. I got the word from Mom, and a couple years ago I found a copy of the book (the version with the yellow cover) in a used bookstore for her. Quite impressed to discover he predicted gay marriage as a basic next-generation eventuality.
Re: how to choose, here's what I did. You'll be proud.
Step 1: Go to the dropdowns and start selecting each geographic region. Make a note of how many loan requests are in each one.
Step 2: Decide how many loans you're making, and divide the total available loans by that number.
Step 3: Apportion the loans geographically. (This is when you will be tempted to raise the number of loans you're making to get the numbers to be prettier. I know, because it happened to me.)
Step 4: Filter by things that are important to you. My checklist:
a) Are there any loans in Health or Education? I fill those first, regardless of region or anything else.
b) In each region that I've decided to loan to, I filter by gender=female, because there's a lot of research showing the power of increasing women's economic stability.
c) I sort oldest to newest. This will bring up a bunch of collectives. They're larger total loans and the picture of 24 people is less tear-jerking than one woman looking brave, so they scroll down the page and people don't get around to filling them. Donating to a community is really effective.
d) Within that filter, I'll look at the individual stories and throw out the ones where the primary business model is cosmetics (no lie) and focus on people who are increasing availability of food, then other basic services (clothing, etc).
But at that point, it's really just "what's oldest that meets these basic criteria?" It all needs doing. Well, except maybe the cosmetics.
Re: Overchoice! My solution.
Re: Another Proud Non-Christian Speaks
Re: Following Gement's Herd
This makes me happy, though, as a lot of those older group loans I mentioned had me worried. I didn't know if they'd get covered in time.
Re: Following Gement's Herd
no subject
KIVA
(Anonymous) 2009-02-16 02:54 am (UTC)(link)At the time I invested, MIFEX had either 4 or 5 stars. All of my investments were either 4 or 5 stars. Of course, then MIFEX went belly-up and all the money went away.
It seems like another one of my 5 star investments is now behind and could possibly go belly-up too.
Re: KIVA
My combined reading and the statistics at http://www.kiva.org/about/risk/statistics/ tells me that they must have been 3 stars the whole time, or at least the whole time defaulted loans were being fundraised, because the 4 and 5 star statistics show a 0.0% default rate. I would say that your 4 and 5 star loans are extremely safe. See the comment lower on this thread re: the breakdown of defaults for more information.
MIFEX moved from 3 to 1 stars in May 2008 before the long investigative silence which lasted until November 2008. I hear one of the coming transparency improvements is a history function on partner orgs so we can see if they've been rising or falling.
Re: KIVA
(Anonymous) 2009-02-18 02:35 am (UTC)(link)Re: Number of Stars. At the time I invested, it was either 4 or 5. That's part of the problem with Kiva - it immediately starts rating all partners at 5 stars and then takes them down over time. So, MIFEX might have been at 3 stars when it folded, but when I invested at least 6 months before, it was either 4 or 5.
As for Kiva's statements regarding defaults and delinquency rate, they will be the first to tell you that they didn't have strong accounting controls around these two metrics. Kiva's own Q&A above notes that the delinquency rate was a nearly meaningless statistic because of their accounting practices. While, the default rate is more accurate, it is slow to update. And if Kiva downgrades partners just before the default, it will never be accurate. To offense to Kiva, but I don't exactly trust any of their numbers given these problems and their own admission that their statistics aren't really valid.
Re: KIVA
Notes for myself, possibly useful for your due diligence.
Of 1835 defaulted loans ever, it went like this:
South America:
*** 734, all MIFEX, a deliberately embezzling organization, 3 stars.
Africa:
*** 886 WEEC, an organization that fell apart after the founding director died, 3 stars.
*** 184 SEED, a deliberately embezzling organization, 3 stars.
*** 9 SAO MFI, no explanation yet, but they had a good track record and now the partnership is closed, which tells me it was probably embezzling, 3 stars.
What's left... I see 23 possibly real defaults.
Africa:
** 2 GHAPE, 2 star. Legitimate defaults. (In both cases, the borrower died.)
* 7 East Africa Beta, the first loans Kiva gave out when they hadn't gotten the hang of this yet (pilot program). These look like legitimate defaults.
Middle East:
* 8, all Shurush, a new organization that went under quickly in the face of political instability, 1 star. These look like legitimate defaults.
Eastern Europe:
* 6, all REDC Bulgaria, a new organization that wasn't very good at verifying individual lenders, 1 star. These look like legitimate defaults.
This all lines up with the default percentages broken down by star rating at http://www.kiva.org/about/risk/statistics/. Data as of Feb 17, 2009.
Re: Notes for myself, possibly useful for your due diligence.
Very, very, very, very vocal about agnosticism.
Re: Very, very, very, very vocal about agnosticism.
Re: Very, very, very, very vocal about agnosticism.
All that religion stuff isn't true.
*gets all exited* You have DATA?
No.*sad face*