Kiva cabbie

There’s idle time in taxidriving. After the afternoon rush to the airport, to car repairers, to and from Parliament House, there’s a quiet evening period where the work is steady but slow. Some nights get busy after midnight as we take home the nightclubbers.

But there’s always time to crank the seat back, reach down for a book, and read a few pages before the next passenger shows up.

Lately the reading material has been a book on changing lives. An inspirational book talking of the beneficial impact of very small loans to the world’s poorest people. Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, was once a professor of economics, who looked out of his office window to a small village and wondered how the theories he was teaching related to the residents.

On investigation, he found that the poorest people in the village were very poor indeed, held back by poor access to money offered at usurious interest rates. A woman would work all day weaving intricate crafts for a profit of a few cents, which she spent on feeding her children. If she could gain just a small amount of money to escape the money-lenders who were also her raw material suppliers and the tied buyers of her work, she could prosper and profit.

From a small seed loan came a great organisation, breaking free of money-lenders, private banks and government corruption and ineptitude. Aimed at small loans to the very poorest, Grameen Bank prospered, spinning off programs and organisations across the globe.

His book, Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty, has been my taxicab reading material for the past week.

He struck a chord with me. For too long the great charity organisations have thrived in the developed nations, growing platoons of well-paid executives in modern office towers who plan advertising campaigns for donation drives staffed by unpaid volunteers. The spokesmen for these groups are always immaculately dressed in business suits or tailored adventure kit, posing before the cameras, asking for yet more money. The donations with which they are entrusted are diluted by administration costs and advertising. Delivery is facilitated by payments to government officials. Consultants jet in, stay in business hotels, hire cars and dine in the best restaurants.

I’ve had the opportunity to study one of the more visible charity saints, and I have rarely seen a more horrid, selfish, bigoted and intolerant bastard in my life. Before the cameras he is sympathetic smiles. In private he is ruthless, vicious in eliminating competition and fiercely protective of his public image. Every inch the manipulative politician.

He gets the funds in, sure, but how much good does he do to those who need it most? I wonder.

In contrast, Grameen Bank executives are to be found riding bicycles to remote villages, sleeping on rush mats, sharing bowls of rice and vegetables with their clients, dodging attacks verbal and physical from the established political, financial, social and religious groups who depend on the status quo for their standing.

In particular, Grameen Bank helps women. In the poorest nations, women often carry the greatest load and have the lowest status. A mother will cut her own food short so that her children may grow and when food is very short indeed she will starve, but before that point she suffers the agony of being unable to breastfeed her baby.

Now, I’m not willing to cut back my own comfortable lifestyle too much. I could sell everything I owned, give it to the very poorest, and never make a dent in global poverty.

But I can help. My passengers sometimes give me tips. The businessmen and the government officials so rarely tip that it is a cause for wonder when they do. But those who pay the fare from their own pocket, those who are least able to afford a generous gesture, they are my best tippers.

From now on my tip money goes into microfinance loans. Not a huge strain on the resources, but a gesture that helps others, and makes me happy in the knowledge.

Kiva.org is one of those internet creations that enables people like me to lend money to those in need, with very little administrative costs, no huge organisation, no Business Class Saints. I can choose where my money is to go, and I can see how it is spent, right down to the individual receiving the loan.

Typically loans are small, for a few hundred dollars, repaid over a year or two, and aimed at gaining resources that can be turned to profit. A sewing machine, a second-hand fridge, a new engine for a taxi. Each loan is financed by multiple lenders giving twenty-five dollars each. Loans are often approved and disbursed, and then “backfilled” using the internet money. The borrower commences repayments immediately. Small regular repayments until the total is repaid. And when the money comes back home, it can be re-lent, gifted to Kiva, or withdrawn.

The whole process is transparent, save for necessary privacy concerns. Some of the loans don’t work out. Meh. Twenty-five dollars. I spend that much on coffee in a week. But most of the loans succeed. The borrower often goes on to apply for a larger loan. The rickshaw becomes a minibus. The street vendor opens a restaurant. The kitchen seamstress employs more like herself and opens a clothing shop.

Lives are enriched. The world gets ever so slightly better off.

I’m starting small. I’m helping out a cabbie in Azerbaijan. My Kiva lender page is here. I’m feeling very warm and happy and positive about this.

And, for a night cabbie who has occasionally been roused from honest sleep by a collector for one of the glossy charities, and been mistaken by that collector for a snarling attack dog, this is good news indeed!

–Skyring

Bonus video: PBS story on Kiva