Power to the Bottom

by Rob Katz, NextBillion.net - Development Through Enterprise - Microfinance on Sep 08, 2008

By Lily Huang

In Tajikistan, Georgetown graduate student Dan Zuckerman is the face of Kiva, a San Francisco-based microlending organization operating in a region that currently hums with nearly 3,000 Kiva-sponsored entrepreneurs. Zuckerman has to get to know them and act as their bridge to their remote lenders by sharing their stories, both with the people providing loans and with the local microcredit institution, MLF MicroInvest, which is Kiva's partner. In all of Tajikistan, he works alone. How does Zuckerman, 25, manage to cover all this ground without support staff and with a supervisor 11,000 kilometers away? Between field visits, he logs on to the Kiva Fellows wiki page, which allows him to tap into ideas about best practices from the experiences of Jara Small in Tanzania, Javed Rezayee in Afghanistan, Cynthia McMurry in Bolivia and the rest of the 100 Kiva Fellows dispersed among 45 countries. The wiki not only makes Zuckerman and his colleagues more effective, it also, as Kiva president Premal Shah puts it, gives them the ability to "co-create Kiva."