How can we make the Kiva Investment Group sparkle?
Ari brought this up again in the comments section this morning. How can our Kiva Investment Group be more useful to us...and to our entrepreneurs? Several of you have raised the idea of a group investment. Pick a borrower that we are all interested in and invest together. What do you think?I know Ramon is focused on Latin America while I am interested in the poorest countries on earth - which are concentrated for the most part in sub-Saharan Africa. Others may have their own investment focuses. So we'd have to agree to put our strategies aside for the good of the group, if that turned out to be necessary. Which would be okay with me.
Here's another simple idea. If one of us notices a potential borrower is having trouble completing their loan, she could put up a message here asking fellow PIG-KIGs to jump on it. And, as finances permit, we would all agree ahead of time to do that.
Or, as a group we could take on the stalest, least pretty borrowers out there. I can tell you right now they are all are grumpy middle-aged Muslim men in Azerbaijan who sell spare parts or run a junkyard. Why can't they be winning little 23 year old yam sellers like the borrower I just helped fund in Ghana?
Because they're grouchy old guys like me! At least they're not lazy pigs. Strike a blow for grumpy old men! Join KIG!
My original idea was simply to use the Kiva Investment Group to encourage other readers to join us. That's working, but we seem to be ready to take the group a step farther. More ideas and discussion, please.
If you read all this and have no idea what I'm jiving about, click on the Kiva ad in the upper right corner.
Image credit: Friends of Freddy
Labels: Kiva Investment Group
posted by Christopher Newton at 10:43 AM
15 Comments:
Personally, I don't favor to fund the least desirables just because they are less desirable. I am trying to invest with "some" business sense, which means that I need to believe in my investment before putting my money down. And believing means that the opportunity must sound "right", that the amount must be fitting to the opportunity and enough to make a real difference, and that the payback period must be on par with the opportunity and loan amount-- $1500 in 12-15 months is OK, $600 in 6-10 months too, but $600 in 15 months is not!
However, it would be interesting to "pool" our money into a single opportunity, thereby becoming a "majority" lender. Initially, we could do this by each of us investing individually into an opportunity, but later we could think about a "pooled source", a single paypal account that will allow us to lend as a single source.
There are some questions to be solved, though, for a single source thing:
- who will control the actual account? It should be someone that we all think is trustworthy, that won't run off with our money and doesn't any "unauthorized expenses".
- We should all understand that our investment is at risk, and that there is a chance we won't get paid back ever.
- What will happen when the loan is paid off? Will we a-priori agree to reinvest our money in another loan, or will we repay it to the lenders? If the latter, this means extra work for the "account holder" to transfer between Paypal accounts, which costs money.
I suggest we stick to the "simple" way for now of pooled individual investments...
(Note, these are just some ideas, not final proposals or anything I need to religiously adhere to...)
I think the group loan idea is a great one. More power in the many.
Is there anyway that Kiva could send us a list of loans that are taking time being funded?
How often will we do this? When necessary or at a fixed time? We could start with once a month or something. We could vote on who to choose. I like the idea of choosing some of the not-so-sexy loans that others may not want to fund.
My Kiva strategy is currently to try to get as many different countries as possible and all of the Honduras loans. And I'm partial to sewers.
My guess is that grouchy old guys selling spare parts in Azerbaijan may actually be very good business investments, yet they are passed by because they're not sexy, as Julia says. I think a clear business eye like yours, Ramon, might be able to spot them.
Current borrower wannabes at the Kiva site can be sorted from old to new, so that gives us a rough idea of how long an entrepreneur has been waiting for funding.
I'll write to Kiva and see if we can get more concrete info.
At first pass, I believe establishing a group or "foundation" investment fund is a very good idea that could be quite effective. Completing a slowly developing loan funding for a particular business, or perhaps even fully funding a desired loan, will enable the funded ventures to hit the ground running sooner rather than later. To a successful, thriving business, "Time," as they say, "is money"; to an emerging or under-capitalized business "Money is time."
As Ramon correctly pointed out, however, the foundation model of investing is not without certain administrative problems. I personally have no concerns about the trustworthiness of anyone who is involved with the Kiva Investment Group as it is presently constituted, and I say that without knowing any of them. But I do know they are, in fact, members of the Kiva Investment Group, and that says something. At least it says something to me.
My main concern is that because the individual investment group members quite naturally have differing personal investment parameters and strategies, and there is such a huge range of investing opportunities, how difficult might it be for everyone to agree on a single, perhaps significant investment?
I'm gonna think on this some more.
Greg
I think the pooling our monies and becoming a "majority" or even "sole" lender would be an interesting way to go, in addition to our individual loans. I would hope the understanding would be that when the money is repaid it would be re-loaned (I like the fact that Ramon said "a-priori". Nowhere will you hear words like that besides the Pondering Pig.)I'm certain that everyone involved already knows the risk factor, so that shouldn't be an issue.
I would agree with Ramon that our loans must be able to make a real difference, but that's a judgement that I find difficult. What makes sense to me as an investment here in the US doesn't necessarily make sense to someone in, say Togo. Personally, I don't have the business acumen to always know the difference.
All I know for sure is that I loaned to 2 people in Kenya so they could buy milk cows. They have been funded and they are both paying back as scheduled.
Would we be better investors that way, pooling resources? I'm not sure. But we could, as the Pig points out, fund deserving folks that, for whatever reason, lack funding.
Like Greg, I have no problem concerning trustworthiness. Maybe naive, but I think not. The fact that we do what we do with KIVA says a lot.
Maybe the Pig needs to brew some of that "special" tea to clear our heads?
What about posting a new borrower every few months, and we just all madly fund that person? I don't know who would decide which borrower to lend to, but it seems a lot less complicated to me than getting a joint PayPal account. Bleah. If that happens, I won't be in charge!! LOL!!
I like the idea of us doing something as a group, though. I like it a lot!
I have no trust issues with the rest of you either. Althoug Ramon brought up very good points, I think the joint paypal idea in order to fund a loan as KIG is very interesting and would probably raise interest among other Kiva lenders. More people may want to join KIG, which is fine, but I think we have to have an objective first: what's the goal? KIG as the sole or majority lender to an entrepreneur would look cool on his/her account page, but would there be any real difference than if we had individually lent him/her? Of course, there's nothing wrong with funding loans as KIG just for fun, and looking cool as KIG for fun, but we should decide that in advance. Here's an idea: KIG loans will be donated to Kiva once repaid. If we each donate $25 to a KIG investment once every three months, and there are... 12 of us? That's $1200 a year for Kiva. If more people join KIG, we could even reduce the amount per person. Say 30 people were a part of KIG, and each donated $5 a month, KIG could fully fund a $600 loan every 4 months, and Kiva would keep the money after repayment. Of course... since Kiva offers/requests a 10% donation for each loan, there's maybe no point to all this either. Do you guys always add the 10%? I admit I haven't done it for all my loans, sometimes I've just put $1 or even $0. I'm basically just thinking out loud. What was your initial idea for the KIG, pondering pig? Oh, one of my guys is an Azerbaijani spare parts person!
Hey Ramon, did you see the new loan requests from rice farmers in Ecuador? Mifex just set up a banking system for them, very cool. I'll lend if you do :)
My petty first-world complaint of the week: I wish Kiva would sign me in automatically when I go to the site, like Gmail does and lots of other sites you have to log into... I've started accessing my account a lot more these days and it gets tiring to enter my login info every time. Admittedly, Windows "remembers" this for me, so I really only have to type "a" and then select my email from the drop down menu, then the info appears like magic. I'll just go to bed now.
Hello Mr Pig,
I stumbled across Kiva today on the web and think it looks great. What other things on the web like this, are you interested in?
The reason I ask is that I work at The Economist on a web innovation project. We've got six months to come up with a great idea that 'makes a difference'.
So if you've got any suggestions then please go to www.projectredstripe.com. For a more personal look at it then my blog has its own manifesto.
Best,
Tom
I wish Kiva were in China. I just read a book about Gansu province and I wish we could invest there.
Ok Pig, you convinced me:
http://www.kiva.org/lender/andreea8522
wow, this Laurent guy in Belgium is amazing, he's loaned to 240 people ! http://www.kiva.org/lender/laurent5933 he should totally join KIG. It would be nice if Kiva lenders could contact one another.
I just went over to "Tom"'s blog (see above) to see what he wanted to talk about.
Then I noticed "Tom's" email address was 'noreply-comment@blogger.com' Funny email id for a guy named Tom, right?
Turned out to be a complete come on. From The Economist, too. I looked at the blog he mentioned but nobody named Tom was there that I could see. Can you believe that? You probabably do.
Tom, if you want to talk with us, stand up like a man with an email we can respond to.
PonderPig
@Ari... I already had invested in one before you posted the comment... (Sorry for answering late-- I have been extremely busy since coming back from my Europe trip last week, without a chance to post much until today.)
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