Got To Be Haiti, Right?

Word leaked from Kiva last night - they're bringing on a new country sometime today. Here's their clue:

• After one of its former rulers "resigned", he was promptly "escorted" to the Central African Republic
  
• MINUSTAH
• Mountains Beyond Mountains

Got to be Haiti, right? That's where Aristide landed after being ejected from the country's presidency in 2004.

Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere by far. It's rated #153 out of 177 countries on the Human Development Index. C,mon Kiva Investment Group - can we make an impact here?

I'll predict Haitian entrepreneurs will be picked up fast - if you have a spare $25 in your wallet today, this would be a good opportunity to invest in a country as a group.

Photo credit: International Real Estate Digest

Tatyana Is The Nigger Of The World

Too late, Pig Fanciers -- Jimmy (see yesterday's post) got funded. Took one day. One of the Tatyanas is funded too, I'm happy to say. The others are still waiting patiently in line. Got an extra $25.00 handy? I already spent my allowance for the week on Jimmy.

By the way, I usually invest in women. It's not a personal idiosyncrasy - I just believe in their empowerment. Women in the developing world have an even tougher time than the guys. And they get more screwed (not literally) by the power structure. For instance, I read that in the least developed countries, nearly twice as many women over age 15 can't read or write as compared to men. Why is that? You tell me.

Here's a good one: Women do two thirds of the world's work, produce half the world's food, and yet get only ten percent of its income. Why is that?

So my bias is towards empowering women economically by giving them credit. Mine. What's your bias?

I made an exception for Jimmy though, because he's a primary school teacher, and we have to help him keep that job. Education is one of the big gifts. Helping an educated, intelligent, and dedicated guy in that job is worth a shift in my policy.

By the way, in case you don't remember, the incendiary title of this post comes from a 1972 song by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. So before you start shooting - read the lyrics here.. .

Kiva Investment Group Opportunity

What do you think about an elementary school teacher in Managua, Nicaragua? There's not a lot of money in teaching kids down there, so to make ends meet Jimmy Blass Rubio started a side business repairing people's TV sets and stuff. Now he wants to borrow $750 to buy tools and materials to improve his service.

Ramon thinks he's a good bet and has already invested. I followed suit this morning. Whadda ya think?

No Woman, No Cry

Speaking of Kiva investments, we could start a whole business just lending money to ladies named Tatyana who sell underwear from a kiosk somewhere in the Ukraine. All of them stand patiently at the end of the Kiva queue while other better looking, 'more deserving' entrepreneurs cut into line in front of them. It's a dirty trick, really. Can they help it if they're not cute? If they don't know how to repair television sets? There they stand, bundled up in their 1970s ski jackets with bleak brave smiles and hope for the future...

Consider Tatyana Soldatenkova. She's hoping to build her own kiosk.

Or Tatyana Timoshenko. Crazy kid wants to build up her inventory of kid's clothes.

Perhaps you'd be more interested in the lovely and talented Tatyana Kondratyeva?

Or, if you just plain don't like people named Tatyana, here is the daring and resourceful Ludmila Matyushkina. Will somebody ask her to dance?

Or are her and her friends just going to sit on the gymnasium bench all night? I HATE that!

Clay from Chattanooga Joins KIG

How about a big KIGster welcome for the newest (and youngest) member of the Kiva Investment Group, Clay from Chattanooga. Clay is already a whiz at Kiva investing and has racked up eleven loans. Like me, Clay seems to have an interest in Sub-Saharan Africa, and like Ramon, he looks deep into Ecuador.

And congratulation's to Clay's Dad too. A cool kid you've got there!

Mormons, Paiutes and Kiva

Never try to run a blog from a dial-up connection. I'll wait till we get home to upload a photo. Dum tee tum tee tum....

Patruska and I are visiting our park ranger kids at Pipe Spring National Monument, way out on the rabbitbrush covered high plateau of the Arizona Strip.

The Arizona Strip is literally a strip of land between the Grand Canyon and the Utah border. Hundreds of miles of mesa and snakeweed and vermillion cliff faces glowing in the sunset, billions of stars at night with Orion getting dizzy up there from his wheeling and wheeling. The Paiute tribe rules the back country and the Mormons rule everything else. We're on the frontier of the nineteenth century Mormon Empire- in fact, Pipe Spring is the remains of a Mormon cattle ranch, built like a fort against Navajo raids.

No cell phone towers, no cable TV, no high-speed internet. In fact, the Arizona Strip is so isolated that until they built the bridge over the Colorado river, the county sheriff had to go around through three states to get here, and all kind of owlhoots holed up on the Strip playing pinochle, drinking redeye whiskey, and planning their next stagecoach robbery. Except no stagecoaches ever came this way. Maybe they could raid the cheese wagon from the Pipe Spring ranch, loaded down with butter and cheese bound for the little town of St. George, seventy-five miles away. The Mormons who kept on practicing polygamy after their church and the government outlawed it - they moved down here too. Colorado City, fifteen miles up the road, is still their headquarters. Their womenfolk still wear old-fashioned long dresses - but with jeans and sneaks and elaborate Gibson Girl hairstyles embellished with a long braid ending in a ponytail. Even the little kids...

Hey, I snagged a new country for the Kiva Investment Group yesterday - Cameroon. Magdalene Mankah was up for a few hours yesterday. She wanted $300 for sticks and nails to mend her pig fence. Needs a year and a half to repay it. A terrible business investment. But I have a feeling she'll pay it back if she can, and I want her pigs to be safe from lions...

Hey again, here's a question for the KIGsters. How can we maintain communication in the group when the Pondering Pig is off wandering around in the forest looking for truffles? This happens. I have a tendency to go off rambling at a moment's notice. So what if an investment opportunity comes up while I am gallavanting? Is the comment section of the blog enough? Or should we get something else going? Like a separate group blog or a Yahoo Group? The great thing about the KIG is that we are all starting to know each other a bit. There's a friendly feeling. And I'd hate to see it dissipate just cause I don't have a high-speed connection for a couple of weeks.

Whaddaya think?

Tatyana's In!

I am so stoked! One day! I feel like we're the Rescue Squad. I can't believe we did it so fast! Where's my cup of tea? 'Cause I'm hoisting one to the PP KIG - the best Rescue Team in the 48 states, Alberta and Iceland. Tatyana could have hung there for months or never got her loan. Then, a couple hours and she's the most popular kid on Kiva. And now she's funded! I know this is stupid but there are actually tears of joy welling up as I write this.

But I'd better squelch 'em fast cause I'm writing you from the Diamondback Motel in Bad Guy, Montana. One sign of weakness and they want your lunch money.

Isn't doing good a gas? Next lets tell everybody what we're doing and rustle up a few more members. Build up our superpowers. When I get to a quiet place, I want to write a report for the Yahoo! Kiva Group about this.

I wonder if Alma from San Leandro is a silent member or just saw a good thing and grabbed it?

Big Sales Pitch for Tatanya's Berdyansk Boutique

OK, Bigshots. I think everyone who wants to comment has had a chance by now, so here's what I heard:

Clear majority of us want to proceed, but nobody is in love with setting up a special Paypal account to do it.

Julia and I like the idea of picking an unpopular Kiva borrower who meets Ramon's criteria for good business investment. Lets do something as a group we wouldn't do on our own. We'll do good while still being wise about our money.

There's nothing I would like better than to squabble about who to choose as our first borrower, but I am leaving on a 1000 mile drive this afternoon and will have sketchy access to internet for the next week. So, if you will forgive me, I propose someone right now...the daring and resourceful Tatanya Ryeznik of Berdyansk,Ukraine.

Read her profile - She's cool. She has a track record. She wants to borrow a substantial amount and pay it back at between 10 and 20 per cent per month. There's absolutely no reason why this lady should get lost in the shuffle, yet, sorted by popularity, she comes up on the very last page, and sorted by age, her loan request has been up a long time.

Forget about it! C'mon superheroes, Tatanya needs some help here! Let's get this lady funded! To get to her page, just click on my Kiva ad. Hopefully, her picture will stay up until she is funded.

Minutes: Kiva Bigshots Meeting

I'm not sure if we had a quorum or not, but a bunch of KIGsters showed up and we threw around some ideas and it was a good thing. Here's what we said:

Everybody present agreed it would be cool to fund Kiva borrowers as a group in addition to our private investments. Two ideas came out about how to do it.

1. We agree on one entrepreneur (at a time) and then, as Paula put it, we all "just madly fund that person." Simple, clean and we retain our independent investor status.

2. We establish a KIG Paypal account. Everybody puts what they want in the account and we fund our people as the Kiva Investment Group. We could completely fund one loan or diversify and loan as a group to many borrowers just as we do now. I found a group that is already working this way - there are probably others too.

If we go with Idea 2, Ari suggested when a loan is repaid we donate the money directly to Kiva. Makes sense to me: good to do, a substantial donation to a great organization, and it would vastly simplify our bookkeeping.

Other Ideas:

Ramon wants us to invest with our minds as well as our hearts. He thinks we should pick businesses that have a chance of succeeding, and presented some simple principles to help us do that. Leo pointed out it might be hard to apply principles that make sense in the developed world to a country as culturally different as Togo.

Pig suggested we focus on people who are having trouble raising loans - and, if a business that's not getting any bites looks sound, take it on as a group. We could use our combined muscle to help the losers not be losers. He doesn't think this needs to violate Ramon's business principles. Greg and Julia agreed. (Notetaker Pig adds: We would be doing something as a group that's different from how we invest individually, and using our group power to fund viable businesses that can't get funding. We'd be like a mini-Kiva inside Kiva.)

I think that's it. Any additions or corrections? New ideas?

Our New Member from San Francisco

I am sorting my notes from yesterday's meeting and I hope to post a synopsis later today. But I've got some hot news...

First, another new member! I am pleased to welcome Andreea! She's a Romanian expat living in San Francisco. I've been following her blog since I came across it accidentally while searching for photos on Google. I love the wonderful photographs of my home city she posts from time to time, but it's more than that. Andreea writes sensitively and intelligently and not too often - and pleases me - what more can I say? Oh yeah - here's her member page.

It's great to have you in the group, Andreea.

Secondly, following up on my idea yesterday to use KIG power to fund loans no one else cares about, I wrote to Kiva to ask how we could do that. I just got this answer back.

Thank you for your continued support of Kiva.org!

The best way to tell if a borrower is "unattractive" is to sort by
popularity and find the least popular (at the end). The best way to find the oldest is to sort by "old to new" and choose those that are at the beginning.

Thank you for supporting Kiva.org on your website as well - I think it's fantastic!

Best Regards,

Anushka Ratnayake

I'd really like to consider this for the group. I'm not in this to make money - or to lose money. I just want to do what I can to give the forgotten of this world more of a chance. I think you probably feel the same. And this group might fit the bill. We could let Ramon be our investments advisor and sort out the wisest investments in the bunch. My intuition tells me there will be plenty.

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

More KIG News

Yet another new Kiva Investment Group member today: Jenny, a nurse. In the spirit of full disclosure - I must reveal she is one of my great kids! Welcome, Jenny. Jen is home waiting out the final weeks before her due date. So she may be too busy for a while to attend KIG meetings. Patrushka and I will be heading for the east coast in April to help out. How do you change a diaper, anyway?

Also, Julia checked in to say she has added, among other countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo, new for the group.

Country Hunters: Keep your eye out for Mongolia. It's supposed to be coming online anytime now.

Our New Member From Iceland

A big Kiva Investment Group welcome to Ari from Iceland, our first 'offshore' member. Of course, to Ari - we're the ones who are 'offshore'. He's our first member outside of North America and we are dead pleased to have him with us. Share your hot investing tips, Ari.

Ari brought with him investments in Tajikistan and Mozambique. If you look at the map, you'll see we're now in 10% of the countries of the world. Good going, everyone.

I've been meaning to plug a couple of our member's Kiva blogs. Check them out. Julia's How I Changed The World Today is upbeat. The kid's got a great spirit. Also an Obama activist. (Right now, I'm liking John Edwards. Anybody that right wing columnist Ann Coulter hates so much must be cool. Actually, her invective reactivated my interest and I've started reading about him. So thanks, Ann. I have to do same on Obama.)

Enough USA politics, which must be terminally boring to Canadian and Icelandic Kivites. The other blogger you should read is member Ramon's Ramon's Kiva Blog. He writes about his recent travels in Peru. He has family in Lima, and while there he met with microcredit officials to try to get Kiva started in that country. Has some interesting insights into the people we're lending to.

If you don't know what we're talking about, go click on my Kiva ad in the right hand corner. Then take action. Then join us.

If you already do Kiva, send me your member page link and I'll add you to our group. To find my e-mail, just check my profile page.

A Little More Toothpaste in Bala Behmenli

Well, my Muslim refugee druggist in Bala Behmenli finally got her Kiva funding. It was dispersed first of the month. Actually, though, I don't think she's a druggist at all. She's just a normal person who sells little boxes of antibiotics and 'medicinal preparations', as you can see in the picture. She borrowed a thousand bucks to add toothpaste and shampoo and that kind of gimcrackery. Thinks people will buy it if she stocks it.

Small business. Buy low! Sell high! I used to be in the marijuana business in a small way in my youth. I'd go in with friends to buy a ki, then we'd split it up into little one ounce baggies and sell those for three or four times what we'd paid wholesale. The goal was to pay the rent, eat, get high ourselves, and earn enough extra to do it again. I liked how easy it was to make money, but I didn't like the part about going to San Quentin, so I got a job tending a Mexican import shop on Haight Street instead. That was my one experience with life as a businessman. Just didn't have that entrepreneurial spirit.

Ayshan is a lot gutsier. Or maybe she likes hanging around the store all day making money. Azerbaijani manat signs dancing in her eyes (that's their currency. I looked it up). And what else is she going to do? She got thrown out of her home village because of the war with Armenia and she's got to make a living in a new village - her and half a million other 'internally displaced' refugees.

So why did I lend her $25 to buy wholesale toothpaste? I think it's because I love capitalism. We need more people to buy low and sell high. Then the world will be a better place like it is here.

Or maybe I just thought, "Hey. Twenty-five bucks. I can afford it. I think I'll just take a chance she guessed right about all those villagers wanting their toothpaste and shampoo."

Kiva Fat Cats Eat Sardines While Waiting For Pie

The Pondering Pig Kiva Investment Group Board Meeting continues...

PPig: Hey, thanks, Jessica Flannery, founder of Kiva, for sticking your head through the door to give us a few words of encouragement. I found this interview/podcast with Jessica on Britt Bravo's blog. If it wasn't for Jessica and her husband Matt, we might still be wondering how to spread some of our wealth around.

OK, maybe we're not wealthy in North American terms, maybe we do have to meet at Portley's Lunch Counter after he closes, but compared to the guys in Mozambique and Honduras and Azerbaijan- North Americans are pretty fat cats.

Look at the Human Development Index...

Ok, don't look at it. It's pretty boring. I'll tell you about it. The HDI is a fairly questionable list of every country that keeps statistics and how they compare to each other on how long people live, how much education they have, and how much money they make. You can question the statistics right down the line - and you should - but the true statistics are bound to make countries look worse, not better.

According to the Index, guess who are the fattest cats in the world? If you guessed the United States you guessed wrong. We're down at number 8. Canada is couple rungs above us at number 6. The fattest cats in the world live in sardine country, naturally ...NORWAY!



And the skinniest cats live in a little African country you never heard of: Niger. People in Norway live twice as long as people in Niger. They're forty times wealthier. And the educational statistics from Niger are, well, fatal.

Belladonna: So what's this got to do with Kiva, Pig? You suggesting we should fix up Niger, than move on to the next country on this list?

PPig: Well, I was wondering if something like that makes strategic sense. Not Niger, because Kiva isn't working there yet, but maybe Mozambique. They are the skinniest cats on the Kiva website according to the HDI.

Kirstie: I think poor people are poor, period. It doesn't matter where you live. Kiva borrowers have a dream, they have a hope, they think they can feed their families better, maybe fix their roof - whatever, if they can get a business loan to build up their businesses. I don't see why it matters what country they're in.

PPig: True enough. But we do have to choose. I counted 41 people hoping for a loan on Kiva this morning. If you loan $25 to everybody, that's $1025 today and more coming tomorrow. We have to pick a person, so to speak. Who is it going to be? Right? Am I right? How do you decide? I'd like to know and Portley's Lunch Counter is open for discussion on this topic.





Image credits: Nations Online, Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Hermatikk, Patrushka

Kiva Investment Group Bigshots Meet

Transcript of the Pondering Pig Kiva Investment Group Managing Directors Meeting Feb 27 2007

PPig: Welcome, Directors, to cousin Portly's Lunch Counter. Yep, no mahogany conference table plundered from the forests of Borneo for us! And Portly said we could meet here after he closed if we bussed our own coffee cups. He even left us a pie for later.

Is everybody here?

Let's see.
Belladonna?
Greg?
Hannah?
Julia?
Kirstie?
Leo?
Loryjean?
Patrushka?
Paula and Spoke?
PonderPig?
Ramon?

That's all the members so far of our Kiva Investment Group. Of course, as you may know, we encourage everyone to join our exclusive group. Just invest in a Kiva businessperson or two (by clicking on the box in the upper right corner), and email me me your Kiva Member Page Link. A Member Page looks like this, for example.

Now, let's get down to business.

I have been tallying our member lists and find that between the eleven of us we are partnering with seventy-five micro-entrepreneurs in eighteen different countries.

Group: Clap clap clap! Hooray! Let's adjourn! Cut the pie!

PPig: Keep your mitts off that pie! Folks, our micro-entrepreneurs are starting or expanding grass roots businesses in some of the poorest countries in the world. We're giving them a chance to succeed on their own terms without any charity.

Oh, I know a lot of us are just going to loan out our money again after we get paid back. No one's trying to make a profit. We just think, "Hey, twenty-five bucks! I'll spend more than that if I take the Pondering Pig out to lunch! And it'll really make a difference to these Kiva guys."

Leo: Gee, we could give out bumper stickers. Invest in Kiva...or take the Pondering Pig out to lunch!

PPig: Hmmph! May I continue? Our partners' two most popular businesses are selling clothes and running little grocery stores. In fact, nineteen of our seventy-five businesses are in those two areas. Mostly, people run the businesses right out of their home or have a little stall in the marketplace. Building up their inventory is the number one reason for wanting a loan.

Ramon: Yeah, but we invest in all kinds of other businesses too. Besides retail, we have a blacksmith in Ecuador, a guy in Azerbaijan who raises sheep, a Bulgarian beekeeper, a lady in Kenya who sews embroidered seat covers (a big seller), and a furniture maker in Mexico. In Nicaragua, we've even invested in a cyber cafe .

Loryjean: I like my tomato lady in Togo. Her name is Ms. Houégnamétor Adjogble.

Julia: And I like my three tailors in Afghanistan, like Nafesa Gul Dad.

Hannah: Don't forget my beautician in Senegal, Fatou Kine Niang!

PPig: OK OK, we are investing in really cool people, and it's great to see them taking their destiny into their own hands. My question is...how are their loan repayments coming?

Tomorrow: Do KIVA Borrowers Repay Their Loans? KIG's Experience. Plus All Kind of Other Interesting Stuff. Plus Pie All Round.



Photo - Portly's Lunch Counter: Patrushka
Photo - Fatou Kine Niang: Kiva

Milwaukee Joins Kiva Investment Group

Hey, Milwaukee just joined the Kiva Investment Group. Welcome, Loryjean, old hometown friend of our regular contributor Leo Sadorf. Loryjean so far is focusing her investments on West Africa -- Ghana and Togo, and she's partnering with a tomato retailer with the improbable and wonderful name, Houégnamétor Adjogble. Here's a link to Loryjean's Kiva lender page.

Join Kiva and then join our Kiva Investment Group. We'll post your lender page and follow your borrowers along with you.

If you don't know about Kiva.org - click on the ad in our upper right hand corner, or see my post Rice Sacks and Cooking Oil. It's not charity, it doesn't cost much, it's fun, and you'll be doing something actual and real to help bust world poverty. As for me, I could use some of those tomatoes right now!

Kolb Fund Joins Kiva Investment Group

Welcome, Ramon Kolb and the Kolb Family Fund to our Pondering Pig Kiva Investment Group. I really like his family's plan to make Kiva part of the family budget, investing $25 twice a month into new businesses. You can read more about them on their KIVA lender page. Or review the Group's complete portfolio at Kiva Investment Group.

We're up to eight members now. C'mon in. To join, just make a loan to a Kiva entrepreneur, and send me the link to your Kiva lender page.

Famous Bloggers Join KIVA Investment Group

The famous Canadian blogging couple, Paula and Spoke announced today they have joined the Pondering Pig's Kiva Investment Group. Said spokesperson Spoke: "What an honor to be able to participate in something so selfless! Kiva lets you lend money to a specific entreprenuer in the developing world, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty. And 100% of your loan goes directly to the person! Be a hero, tell your friends too." And then tell the Pondering Pig.

You don't to be a wealthy cigar-chomping capitalist pig like myself or a jewelry-rattling heiress like Paula to participate. (Just kidding, Paula) Twenty-five bucks will do the job and make all the difference to cool people like Maria de los Angeles Castellon, a micro-entrepreneur who's building a life in Nuevo Laredo, across the Rio Grande from the American magnet. Maria's created a snack shop called 'Hamburguesas Mary'. Do you suppose she used to live in San Francisco? Hamburger Mary's was for years the funkiest hamburger dive South of Market. At any rate, Maria caught the eye of the Bloggers of the North, and they helped loan her the funds to improve her business.

Will Paula and Spoke get their money back? Here's what KIVA says:

Your loan is not guaranteed, therefore there is a chance that you will not get your money back. However, just as there are different levels of risk in stocks or mutual funds, there are also different levels in risk in funding a loan.

Your Kiva.org loan is a low-risk loan. Microfinance loans worldwide are generating repayment rates of 97% (UNCDF: Basic Facts About Microfinance). To date, Kiva.org’s repayment rate is 100%.

If you are still concerned about repayment, minimize your risk by diversifying – loan $25 to a number of businesses rather $100 (or more!) to one business.

Join The Pondering Pig Kiva Investment Group. Make a loan to a small-time business person in one of the world's poorest nations through Kiva.org., and then write me. I'll post a link to your lender's page. We're not publicizing our pages for bragging rights, but to encourage other readers to join us. To see our portfolios, click here: Pondering Pig KIVA Investment Group

For more information see KIVA Means Rice Sacks and Cooking Oil.

Kiva Entrepreneur Makes First Repayment

A few weeks ago I joined Kiva and loaned $25 to a micro-entrepreneur in Togo (west coast of Africa) so she could build up her shop's inventory of rice sacks and cooking oil. She was asking for a total loan of $1800. A bunch of us Kiva-ites got together and loaned her the money.

Last night I got a letter from Kiva informing me that Toclaire made her first repayment of $85. The money will be split among all her lenders and when she makes her final payment the funds will be disbursed back to our Kiva accounts. We can then either reinvest or withdraw the money.

Way to go, Toclaire.

If you haven't already done so, go look at Kiva. If you like what you see, make a small loan to some small businessperson of your choice in one of the poorest countries of the world. Being able to borrow funds for their business without paying crippling interest rates (often up to 20% per month from the village moneylender), can make the difference between sinking into worse poverty and rising to a mild affluence - maybe even a roof that doesn't leak.

And let me know how you do - I'll add you to the Pondering Pig Social Investment Group and track your progress.