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Globalizations
ISSN: 1474-7731 (Print) 1474-774X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rglo20
Kiva's Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit inCyberspace
John Carr, Elizabeth Dickinson, Sara L. McKinnon & Karma R. Chávez
To cite this article: John Carr, Elizabeth Dickinson, Sara L. McKinnon & Karma R. Chávez (2016)Kiva's Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace, Globalizations, 13:2, 143-157,DOI: 10.1080/14747731.2015.1062603
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1062603
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Kiva’s Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit
in Cyberspace
JOHN CARR∗, ELIZABETH DICKINSON∗∗, SARA L. McKINNON† &KARMA R. CHAVEZ†
∗University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA∗∗University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA†University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
ABSTRACT While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling
development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist
in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal
political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however,
systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending
portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where
borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the ‘fix’
of microcredit remains universal. This ‘flat’ approach is problematic for two reasons. First,
Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor people’s disadvantage in the coercive form
of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty
through Kiva.org’s lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and
beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic
development aid and intervention.
Keywords: microfinance, microcredit, development, peer-to-peer, kiva.org, cyberspace
Popular development philanthropy has been transformed by Internet-enabled microcredit organ-
izations such as non-profit Kiva International and its Kiva.org web portal (Black, 2009; Gajjala,
Correspondence Addresses: John Carr, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, University of New
Mexico, MSC 01 1110, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. Email: [email protected]. Elizabeth
Dickinson, Kenan-Flagler Business School, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.
Email: [email protected]. Sara L. Mckinnon, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-
Madison, 6016 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave., Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: [email protected]. Karma
R. Chavez, Department of Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 6170 Vilas Hall, 821 University
Ave, Madison, WI 53706, USA. Email: [email protected]
# 2015 Taylor & Francis
Globalizations, 2016
Vol. 13, No. 2, 143–157, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2015.1062603
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Gajjala, Birzesccu, & Anarbaeva, 2011). While its work connecting small lenders with bor-
rowers worldwide is well known, little attention has been paid to how lenders and borrowers
are potentially impacted by Kiva.org’s combining two development innovations—microcredit
and an ostensibly peer-to-peer web architecture. This study interrogates how Kiva.org represents
the complex geographies structuring borrowers’ experiences with the transnational network of
firms, governments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have provided,
enabled, and popularized microcredit. Our analysis suggests that, paradoxically, the aspects of
Kiva.org that promise to enable lenders to ‘Empower People Around the Globe with a $25
Loan’ (Kiva.org, 2013e) actually occlude the geographies that make microcredit a highly pro-
blematic intervention. By offering lenders a false sense of transparency, connection, and bene-
ficence, Kiva.org de-politicizes the financialization of poor people’s disadvantage in the
coercive form of debt.
Kiva.org’s 2005 debut purported to change philanthropic development in two ways. First,
Kiva.org offered a novel ‘cure’ for underdevelopment, namely microcredit. Broadly, microcredit
involves making small loans to those without access to conventional financial services to
promote successful entrepreneurship among the poor.1 While the idea of promoting grass-
roots development with small loans is now well established (Roy, 2010), in 2005 replacing phi-
lanthropic donation with humanistic investment was seen as cutting-edge.
Second, Kiva.org positioned itself as dramatically transforming the distribution of aid. In the
mid-2000s, development-based NGOs such as Oxfam and CARE International used their web-
sites mostly to promote their work and solicit donations. In contrast, Kiva.org introduced the
practice of individual ‘lenders’ choosing and loaning to deserving borrowers (or ‘entrepreneurs’
in Kiva’s terms). Because of this inversion of development decision-making, Kiva positioned
itself as a pioneering alternative to conventional ‘top-down’ philanthropy while stressing
human ‘connection’ (Kiva.org, 2013b).
By combining these two innovations—microlending and a lender-empowered peer-to-peer
web portal—Kiva.org created an ostensibly winning formula. The rise of Kiva.org paralleled
an explosion of public interest in microcredit (Ruben, 2007). Shortly after the United Nations
declared 2005 the ‘UN Year of Microcredit’, (UNCDF, 2005) the New York Times Magazine
featured Kiva.org as one of its top ‘ideas of the year’ (Narang, 2006). Bill Clinton endorsed
Kiva.org in his book Giving (2007), which he promoted alongside the Kiva.org co-founders
on the Oprah Winfrey show. By 2013, only 7 years after going online, Kiva.org had facilitated
over $437 million in loans from over 900,000 members (Kiva.org, 2013b). While this amount
is dwarfed by traditional official aid programs (Desai & Kharas, 2010), Kiva.org has become
the defining microcredit experience for many small-scale philanthropists.2
Despite its success, little research has interrogated how Kiva International’s twinned philan-
thropic innovations work together, notwithstanding its implicit guarantee of both. First, Kiva.org
warrants the effectiveness of microcredit as a development tool. Second, Kiva.org guarantees
that its web portal can accurately identify borrowers for whom a small loan is a path out of
poverty. These twin promises are far from established. Microcredit typically uses social
capital instead of financial capital as collateral, placing stress on borrowers’ social networks,
particularly upon default. And rather than offering an alternative to conventional development,
microcredit is both deeply linked with conventional development and central to a broader project
to use debt to enable and naturalize neoliberal economic policies. Accordingly, borrowers’
experiences with microcredit are contingent upon a host of social, political, and economic
relations at a variety of scales.
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This study analyzes how Kiva.org represents the microcredit interventions facilitated by their
lending portal. For purposes of concision, we use the term ‘geographies’ to encompass the
various spatially embedded power dynamics implicated both by individual loans and by micro-
credit generally—including economic, political, and social relationships. We adopt David
Harvey’s definition of geography as ‘the spatial distribution and organization of those con-
ditions . . . that provide the material basis for the reproduction of social life’ (1984, p. 1). This
broad framework is essential for analyzing the range of often unequal relations operating at a
variety of scales—from the transnational to the intimate—that structure borrowers’ experiences
with Kiva.org facilitated loans. By analyzing web pages from 2011 and 2013, we address how
Kiva.org represents itself, the geographies of microcredit, and its borrowers pursuant to Soeder-
berg’s call to ‘challenge, deconstruct and modify dominant economic representations and mean-
ings of debt’ (2013, p. 538).
Our analysis of reveals a problematic contradiction. Kiva.org offers a powerful sense of
transparency, providing an array of information about potential borrowers, countries where it
loans, partner organizations making the loans, and microcredit theory. These superficially
rich representations, however, obscure essential geographies and unequal power relations
that have made microcredit both the poster-child for ‘millennial development’ (Roy, 2010)
and a destructive intervention in borrowers’ lives. Rather than addressing how microcredit
has been used to simultaneously naturalize a host of neoliberal projects while capitalizing on
the precariousness of the poor, Kiva.org instead offers a deceptively ‘flat’3 and placeless rep-
resentation of the geographies of microlending—where the ‘fix’ of microcredit seems universal
and unqualified.
Contextualizing Kiva.org
It is easy to associate the spread of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs)
such as Kiva.org’s web portal with the emergence of a ‘uniform and utopian connectivity’, yet
the resulting digitally mediated geographies are inevitably uneven and power laden (Zook,
Dodge, Aoyama, & Townsend, 2004, p. 156). Critical scholars now commonly understand
that all knowledge is geographically situated and contingent (Shapin, 1998), rendering
suspect universal claims to truth originating from ‘the view from nowhere’ (Nagel, 1986).
Thus, Haraway (1988) has criticized knowledge that performs the illusory god-trick of giving
the appearance of transparency, truth and total vision, while obscuring its own partiality and
contingency.
The capacity to present partial, situated knowledge as total has expanded with the promul-
gation of advanced visualization technologies. Theorists such as Brighenti (2012) have
argued that ICTs are not simply ‘deterritorialising devices—i.e. devices that simply
enable users to skip distances’ (p. 400), but instead allow certain flows, impose certain
boundaries, and complicate power relationships across real and virtual borders. In turn,
digitally enabled flows and borders can exacerbate existing geographies of inequality
(Graham, 2009).
In recognizing ‘the peculiar territorial stratifications shaped by new media’ (Brighenti, 2012,
p. 3), we explicitly reject techno-utopianism—as typified by Friedman’s bestselling The World is
Flat, which argues that ICTs are enabling a leveling of ‘the global competitive playing field’
(2006, p. 8). Instead, we join the chorus of works criticizing ‘flat earth’ discourses (Marston,
Jones, & Woodward, 2005; McCann, 2008; Smith, 2005).
Kiva’s Flat, Flat World 145
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Reflecting the trend toward techno-utopianism, much of the small but growing body of litera-
ture analyzing Kiva.org either tacitly accepts or actively promotes its twin guarantees. For
example, one strand of research addresses how Kiva.org’s apparent ‘peer-to-peer’ architecture
affects development dollar allocation.4 This includes work analyzing the ways lender-driven
Internet portals—including Kiva.org—enable different patterns of aid distribution (Desai &
Kharas, 2010), and the types of factors that influence Kiva lender choices (Heller & Badding,
2012; Jenq, Pan, & Theseir, 2012; Ly & Mason, 2012). Another emerging literature seeks to
evaluate the relief impacts of Kiva.org and other forms of online, user-driven development.
Such studies interrogate the potential link between online microlending and democratization
(Barry, 2012), and argue for Internet-enabled microcredit as a neoliberal ‘success story’ based
on superficial financial data (Campbell, 2010).
Fortunately, a third sub-literature actively interrogates the, ‘representational or discursive
power and authority of the aid donor over the aid recipient’ (Nair, 2013 p. 630), manifested
on Kiva.org. For example, Gajjala et al. trace how the site reproduces ‘a long-standing paterna-
listic rhetoric underpinned by a Western ideology of “progress” and “development” with regards
to “third world” societies’ (2011, p. 889). Likewise, Black (2009) addresses how cosmopolitan
sentimentality and obligation undergird Kiva.org’s presentation of borrowers. Moodie (2013)
argues that Kiva.org’s visual and narrative techniques simultaneously render borrowers familiar
to lenders while obscuring the gendered risk that borrowers incur from their loans. While these
works are important, they do not directly engage with the broader role that Kiva.org’s geo-
graphic representations play in naturalizing the discourse of microcredit as development
panacea.
Uneven Geographies of Microcredit
Understanding the power-laden geographies that impact borrowers’ microcredit experiences is
essential to evaluating how Kiva.org supports its dual warranties. Here we examine the work
that microcredit does at both the transnational and local scales so as to illustrate the types of geo-
graphies that must be addressed in any account of microlending.
A. Microcredit and Global Neoliberal Financialization
From its inception, complex geographies operating at a transnational scale have profoundly
influenced microcredit and its function within broader economic practices. Muhammad
Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, first proposed using small-scale credit and savings
groups to address persistent poverty in his native Bangladesh in the 1970s. By providing
small loans, often $100US or less, to poor people often victimized by predatory lending practices
(Grameen Bank, 2010), Yunus sought to economically empower marginalized populations. Poor
women were deemed ideal small loan recipients, ‘given their perceived capacities for self-dis-
cipline, wise investment, and role in promoting household welfare’ (Rankin, 2008, p. 1966).
Under Yunus’ initial model, borrowers belong to a small group and hold each other accountable
for repayment, effectively substituting social capital and mutual trust for conventional collateral
(Norwood, 2011), with lenders favoring poverty alleviation over investment profit (Qudrat-I
Elahi & Rahman, 2006).
That said, microcredit’s emergence in Bangladesh and adoption as a prominent global devel-
opment strategy is inseparable from the transnational roll-out of neoliberalism. While some,
including Yunus, position microcredit as a direct challenge to neoliberal policies favoring
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wealthy subjects (Bayulgen, 2008; Yunus, 2007), critical research suggests a more subtle and
problematic relationship between microlending and neoliberalism (Rankin, 2001; Shakya &
Rankin, 2008; Tsai, 2004). Although aggressively promoted as a remedy for the failures of Inter-
national Monetary Fund and World Bank-imposed Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in
the 1980s and 1990s (Dalgic, 2007; Harvey, 2005), microcredit must instead be understood as
a waging of neoliberal policy by other means, under a new globalized ‘Washington Consensus
on Poverty’ (Roy, 2010, p. 36). Like SAPs, the new Washington Consensus is premised upon
market-based solutions and hostility to state economic intervention. Accordingly, microlending
should be for profit, transparent, economically self-sustaining, and uncorrupted by the state or
outside donors (Roy, 2010). Rather than addressing poverty’s structural roots, microcredit repro-
duces the neoliberal discourse; individuals must re-envision themselves not as subjects of gov-
ernmental benefit but as ‘self-seeking, responsible economic agents, now expected to ensure
their own survival’ (Herbert, 2005, p. 851). Such neoliberal ‘entrepreneurial selves’ should
aspire to be autonomous, self-sufficient, empowered, and self-initiating (du Gay, 1996; Gill &
Ganesh, 2007). Reflecting supranational developmental organizations’ neoliberal biases, this
‘version of microcredit is minimalist, entrepreneurial in intent and centered on banking
options’ (Townsend, Porter, & Mawdsley, 2004, p. 874). The development and implementation
of universal standards is at the heart of this approach, typically under the auspices of the World
Bank-sponsored Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) and its ‘Boulder Institute’ train-
ing program, which have monopolized microcredit ‘best practices’ across the world (Roy, 2010).
Undermining this vision of microcredit-enabled ‘development from below’ is a growing
understanding that Washington Consensus on Poverty approaches to development simply
rescale debt as a tool for neoliberal restructuring. On the one hand, microcredit follows a now
familiar neoliberal playbook by which debt is mobilized by the core to both exert control
over peoples in the periphery (Fridell, 2013), and to depoliticize that exercise of control under
the language of economics and personal choice. ‘Wrapped in the technical and economistic
cloak of the official discourse of debt, states are able to represent their policy choices in
natural (inevitable) and neutral (classless) terms, thereby reproducing the apolitical coding of
debt’ and obscuring ‘the underlying relations of power: that is, inequality in all its forms, includ-
ing gender, class, race and caste, exploitation, domination and resistance’ (Soederberg, 2013,
p. 537). Similarly, Webber has argued that ‘the microcredit approach as a strategy can be
seen to both advance and legitimize neoliberal restructuring’ by attempting to ‘fix’ the abuses
of SAPs while justifying greater financial sector liberalization (2004, p. 360).
On the other hand, microcredit reflects a rescaling of neoliberal debt to integrate the poor and
their informal economies into the financial sector (Elyachar, 2005, Rankin 2013). Roy describes
this process as the creation of ‘[p]overty capital . . . a subprime frontier where development
capital and finance capital merge and collaborate such that new subjects of development are
identified and new territories of investment are opened up and consolidated’ (2010, p. 30).
The rise of poverty capital in the periphery has not occurred in a vacuum. Rather, it is dependent
upon and produced by structural transformation in both donor and debtor countries, leading to
increasing, ‘promotion of market-dependence on consumer credit for basic subsistence needs’
(Soederberg, p. 540) at a time when peripheral states’ investments in governmental employment
and subsidized agriculture are being rolled back (Rankin, 2013). Thus, rather than providing a
pathway to financial independence, for many borrowers microcredit is simply part of a larger
array of increasingly ineffective techniques for managing personal crises of consumption
(Bond, 2013; Roy, 2010). Accordingly, microcredit must properly be understood as fundamental
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to a broader project of neoliberal ‘accumulation by dispossession’, in that it creates profit by
exploiting ‘geographies of social disadvantage and isolation’ (Rankin, 2013, p. 557).
B. Local Scales of Microcredit and Questions of Empowerment
Notwithstanding popular discourses positing microcredit as a universal panacea, borrowers’
experiences with small development loans vary widely. A rich literature makes it clear that
the ways that borrowers can be harmed from participation in microcredit depends on various
locally articulated, though often multi-scalar, dynamics. These range from urban/rural differ-
ences (Maclean, 2010), the degree of state involvement with development (Rankin, 2008), phys-
ical geography (Sachs, 2005; Tang & Woods, 2008), and financial market conditions (Mosley,
2001).
Perhaps the most thoroughly researched example of such locally articulated factors is that of
gender. Critical research has interrogated how microcredit programs transform borrowers’ net-
works of power (Fisher & Sriram, 2002), with a particular focus on the ways program partici-
pation can disempower women (Lahiri-Dutt & Samanta, 2006; Rankin, 2008). Recent
research has described how microcredit’s substitution of social capital for material collateral
places women at heightened risks when they default. Studies from countries where Kiva.org
operates, including Bolivia (Maclean, 2010), Indonesia (Li, 2007), the Philippines (Milgram,
2005), India (Young, 2010), and Nepal (Shakya & Rankin, 2008), explore how local class,
gender, and ethnic divisions can economically and socially disadvantage female microcredit
borrowers. Thus, Karim notes that even Grameen Bank’s 98% financial recovery rate is achieved
‘through intimidation, force, and violence against poor female members’ (2001, p. 96).
When development takes the form of credit, the fundamental relationship between develop-
ment NGO and poor beneficiary becomes characterized by relations of inequality, as credit ‘rep-
resents the ability to restructure people’s lives and choices through debt relations, and, as is well
known, debt relations are relations of dependence’ (Karim, 2001, p. 93). At the same time, by
framing these new relationships of inequality and dependence in the form of debt, microcredit,
‘acts to erase, minimize, order hierarchically, and/or separate environmental, racial and gen-
dered dimensions that are intrinsic to forms of debt . . . as well as relations of power therein’
(Soederberg, 2013, p. 538). That said, the use of debt to facilitate accumulation by dispossession
is always enabled by configurations of, poverty finance and local social relations’ (Rankin, 2013,
p. 561), that are never the same in any two places or for any two borrowers.
Kiva.org’s Placeless Vision of Microcredit
The first of the essential ‘guarantees’ Kiva.org implicitly makes is that microcredit is an appro-
priate and effective tool for alleviating poverty and empowering people. In contrast to the
complex, multi-scalar and power-laden geographies that actually inform borrowers’ experiences
with microcredit debt, however, Kiva.org offers an a-geographic, power-neutral ‘Washington
Consensus’ understanding of microlending, coupled with an illusory sense of informational
transparency. By presenting a world where Internet-empowered lenders may effortlessly
zoom from a map of the globe down to a borrower’s village or apartment, Kiva.org reproduces
the very type of ‘deterritorialising’ approach to ICTs criticized by Brighenti (2012), Graham
(2009), and Haraway (1988). Simultaneously, lenders can access photos of borrowers in their
colorful native settings alongside a short description of each borrower and their goals for
their loans. And while greater effort and exploration can provide a limited class of microcredit
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information—such as financial data for Kiva’s ‘Field Partner’ organizations that administer
microloans and collect repayment—this ‘god’s eye view’ obscures the very geographies of
microcredit that such place-based information appears to expose.
This cosmopolitan panorama begins on Kiva.org’s home page, with its encouraging banner,
‘Empower people around the world with a $25 loan’ (see http://www.kiva.org). Below the
banner is a mosaic of borrower photos, each with pop-ups showing the borrower’s name,
country, business, and biography. Potential lenders are immediately offered a colorful tapestry
of global images and faces, each united by their association with the periphery, their desire to be
in business, and—conspicuously —a large yellow button to ‘lend now’ with a single click. A box
flashes weekly statistics, including the number of loans made, entrepreneurs funded, new
lenders, amount of money loaned to date, and—most importantly—borrower repayment rates.
The Kiva.org visitor sees a simple, 4-step program for ending poverty: ‘1. Choose a borrower,
2. Make a loan, 3. Get repaid, 4 Repeat!’ When combined with borrowers’ photos and standar-
dized information, and an unquestioned path to empowerment—‘lend now’—the home page
presents individual borrowers from often radically different contexts as part of an uninterrupted
and placeless development and safe philanthropic investment metanarrative.
This metanarrative continues throughout the website. When clicking ‘lend’ (the first link at the
top), three types of loans appear (group, housing, and agriculture), along with a world map that can
zoom into deserving borrowers. The right side of the page lists loans, organized by ‘Popularity’,
‘Loan Amount’, ‘Amount Left’, ‘Repayment Term’, ‘Expiring Soon’, or ‘Most Recent’. Start-
lingly, diverse borrowers are clustered under these tabs based not on geographic context, but on
either the most superficial bases (group borrowing) or the least context dependent (‘popularity’).
The most comprehensive microcredit information is accessed through the ‘About’ tab at the
top of the home page. After a reiteration of the signature Kiva.org statistics (lender numbers,
total loan values, and repayment rate), the number of countries participating (68 as of 2013),
and the number of Field Partners receiving and distributing the loans, the ‘About Us’ portal
offers rudimentary explanations of Kiva.org’s microcredit approach (Kiva.org, 2013b). This
starts with Kiva.org’s (2013b) mission statement to: ‘connect people through lending to alleviate
poverty’. This statement is premised upon a vision of ‘a world where all people—even in the
most remote areas of the globe—hold the power to create opportunity for themselves and
others’ (Kiva.org, 2013b). Throughout, Kiva.org positions microcredit as a sweeping and place-
less development tool.
Through a series of links, the ‘About Us’ page leads to theoretical information about micro-
credit. For example, the ‘About Microfinance’ page provides a short video and a written over-
view of microcredit’s history and principles, a discussion of high interest rates, and an overview
of the debate between profit-driven and anti-poverty approaches (Kiva.org, 2013a). Even here, in
the ‘fine print’, there is a powerful tendency to blur the geographic contingencies of microcredit.
Kiva.org’s sections on ‘Evidence that Microfinance Works’, and ‘Microfinance Can Be a Good
Tool For Empowering Women’ largely rely on citations and quotations from CGAP. And con-
sistent with the CGAP literature (Roy, 2010), these positive assertions agglomerate the poor into
generalized populations and erase the specific geographies and power relations structuring indi-
vidual borrowers’ experience with debt. For example, Kiva.org (2013a) quotes CGAP to support
its a-geographic (and archetypically woman empowering) vision for microcredit:
Comprehensive impact studies have demonstrated that: Microfinance helps very poor householdsmeet basic needs and protect against risks; The use of financial services by low-income householdsis associated with improvements in household economic welfare and enterprise stability or growth;
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By supporting women’s economic participation, microfinance helps to empower women, thus pro-moting gender-equity and improving household well-being.
Indeed, throughout the entire ‘About Microfinance’ page, the only specific locations mentioned
are CGAP-sourced success stories supporting the unconditional assertion that ‘Empirical evi-
dence shows that, among the poor, those participating in microcredit programs who had access
to financial services were able to improve their well-being both at the individual and household
level’ (Kiva.org, 2013a). Encouraging statistics from Bangladesh, El Salvador, India, Ghana,
Indonesia, and Vietnam are cited after this claim (i.e. ‘In El Salvador, the weekly income of
FINCA clients increased on average by 145%’), wrapping it in compelling empirical clothing
that simultaneously strips essential contextual information to explain why these apparently posi-
tive outcomes occurred in these places. Photos of four women of color—from Guatemala, Togo,
Nepal, and Uganda—are offered along with a quotation from a grateful Ugandan entrepreneur to
anchor to Kiva.org’s reiteration of CGAP’s microcredit ‘truths’.
While Kiva.org’s microcredit portrayal is a-geographic, after burrowing into the ‘About
Microfinance’ page, it is not entirely unconditional. For example, near the bottom, Kiva.org
(2013a) quotes the International Year of Microcredit 2005 website for the caveat that:
Microcredit may be inappropriate where conditions pose severe challenges to loan repayment. Forexample, populations that are geographically dispersed or have a high incidence of disease maynot be suitable microfinance clients. In these cases, grants, infrastructure improvements or educationand training programs are more effective.
While these conditions have clearly geographic dimensions, no guide provides Kiva.org
lenders with how to ferret out those ‘inappropriate’ borrowers or localized contexts.
Likewise, further down the page, Kiva.org (2013a) quotes CGAP under the heading ‘Micro-
finance is Not a Silver Bullet’, for the proposition that microfinance is just one among many
strategies for addressing poverty: ‘For microfinance to be appropriate however, the clients
must have the capacity to repay the loan under the terms . . . otherwise, clients may not be
able to benefit from credit and risk being pushed into debt problems’. Moreover, Kiva.org
(2013a) cautions the lender that the:
[d]ependence on a single economic activity or single agricultural crop, or reliance on barter ratherthan cash transactions may pose problems. The presence of hyperinflation, or absence of law andorder may stress the ability of microfinance to operate. Microcredit is also much more difficultwhen laws and regulations create significant barriers to the sustainability of microfinance providers.
While these caveats suggest the potential existence of geographic contingencies that could, in
principle, lead borrowers to suffer from their encounter with microcredit, the task of linking
these problems with specific loans, places, and people is left to the borrower. By failing to
provide any directions for tracing this link, Kiva.org implies that any loan making it onto the
site must be financially sound and empowering. In keeping with the robust literature linking
microcredit to neoliberal ideologies and practices (Barker & Feiner, 2004; Dalgic, 2007;
Weber, 2004), the risk of microcredit failing is at least partially framed as individual failure
(Rankin, 2001; Tickell & Peck, 2003), or bad government (i.e. hyperinflation, absence of law
and order, overregulation of financial markets) (Harvey, 2005).
For lenders willing to dig through the website, Kiva.org offers one last set of resources. With
some effort, the ‘Learn’ page can be found among the 15 pages provided under the ‘Do More’
link under various ‘About Us’ pages (Kiva.org, 2011a). Here, external institutional links and rec-
ommended readings offer a deeper understanding of microcredit. The page starts with two
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children’s books about small loans changing young peoples’ lives in Ghana and Bangladesh, next
to Yunus’ Banker to the Poor. Below these works are listed, in order, The Economics of Microfi-
nance textbook by Economists Beatriz Armendariz and Jonathan Morduch, Economist Jeffrey
Sachs’ The End of Poverty—which Roy (2010) identifies as emblematic of pro-microcredit ‘Mil-
lennial Development’—and A Billion Bootstraps by philanthropist Phillip Smith and microfinance
administrator Eric Thurman, offering microcredit as the path for the worlds’ despondent to pull
themselves out of poverty. In addition to the Grameen Bank and its rival FINCA International,
the following list of ‘Websites and Organizations’ largely consists of entities that Roy has identified
as lying at the heart of the Washington Consensus on Poverty, including CGAP, The Microcredit
Summit Campaign, CGAP’s Microfinance Gateway, and CGAP’s ‘Microfinance Information
Exchange’. Except for Armendariz and Morduch’s text, these resources reflect an almost unquali-
fiedly enthusiastic and placeless perspective on the benefits of small loans for the poor.
This Washington Consensus on Poverty approach permeates Kiva.org’s focus on measurable
rubrics for financial performance, risk, and repayment. In Field Partner lists, the entity’s name
and operational area is followed solely by financial data, including ‘Risk Rating’, ‘Total Loans’,
‘Delinquency Rate’, and ‘Default Rate’. Likewise, the ‘Risk and Due Diligence’ page (through
‘About Us’) focuses on metrics impacting repayment risk and financial sustainability, rather than
poverty alleviation potential or actual development (Kiva.org, 2013f). These risks include
‘macro-level’ (‘a large currency devaluation or the institution of exchange controls by local gov-
ernments may render . . . local currency’ valueless); ‘political’ (‘many Kiva loans are made in
the developing world. Policies can change regarding funds repatriation’); and ‘natural disasters’
(‘a tsunami or drought may greatly reduce the likelihood of loan repayment’) (Kiva.org, 2013f).
Here again, microcredit’s geographic contingencies are simultaneously raised and obscured.
The complexity of making microcredit ‘work’ is rendered placeless, even as risks borne by indi-
vidual borrowers are universalized as inherent to any ‘international’ and ‘developing’ context.
By foregrounding financial data throughout the site, Kiva.org presents microlending through a
god’s eye view of financial transparency by which the world’s gendered poor in their diffused
and context-bound desperation are recontextualized through universalizing and leveling
rubrics of risk, reliability, and repayment.
This a-geographic, placeless vision of microcredit is best represented by Kiva.org’s ‘Happen-
ing Now’ page. Under the banner of ‘[c]onnecting people through lending to alleviate poverty’,
this page offers a world map with a series of animated lines racing between lenders and their
borrowers as loans are made in real time. To the map’s right are Facebook-style entries
listing who has made the loan, to whom, and why, such as ‘Beth and David made a loan
which helps Seydou buy hardware items’ (Kiva.org, 2013c). This page then links to a Vimeo.-
com video titled ‘Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance’ (Kiva.org, 2013d). This video simi-
larly traces each of Kiva.org’s loans for its first five years of operation as points of light
either flying to lenders, or flying back to borrowers, culminating in a rainbow hued blitz of
capital surging across the globe (Kiva.org, 2011c). With both images, Kiva.org offers a
dynamic, flat earth vision where money swiftly flies between lenders and borrowers, free of
any geographic contingencies, barriers, or power inequalities.
Taken together, Kiva.org offers a deceptively Janus faced set of representations. On the one
hand, Kiva.org appears to robustly support an implicit guarantee of microcredit’s effectiveness
in the context of its loans. Lenders are led to think they are only a few mouse clicks away from
any relevant (and objective) information. On the other hand, this appearance of transparent infor-
mation accessibility and connectivity obscures the unevenness of informational borders and flows
within the Kiva.org site (Brighenti, 2012) and power between lenders and borrowers (Moodie,
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2013; Nair, 2013). Kiva.org thus cordons off discussions about the multi-scalar power differentials
that are inseparable from microcredit practices, and the negative impacts they can have on
Kiva.org’s borrowers. And where it provides more granular detail about microcredit practices—
for example, Field Partners’ financial information—those details simply reinforce an inescapable
master-narrative of total visibility, financial transparency, and beneficence.
Kiva.org’s Placeless Vision of Microcredit Borrowers
This illusion of transparency similarly undermines the ‘guarantee’ that Kiva.org has provided
sufficient information about its borrowers to ensure lenders that their small loans will provide
the intended beneficiary a path out of poverty. Neoliberal, Washington Consensus development
strategies, with their, ‘emphasis on “poverty eradication,” “empowerment,” “grassroots-
oriented” or “bottom–up” strategies’, inherently occlude the inherent power inequalities
between aid donor and aid recipient (Nair, 2013, p. 631). Kiva.org powerfully illustrates this ten-
dency by offering an evocative yet ultimately superficial representation of its borrowers that
serves to mask the geographic contingencies they face.
Kiva.org allows lenders to ‘browse’ global ‘entrepreneur’ profiles and choose a venture to
support, such as a restaurant in Peru or a crafts cooperative in Togo. Arguably reflecting the
link between microcredit and neoliberal, pro-market discourses, the entrepreneur is placed
into the lender’s ‘basket’, and the lender ‘checks out’. The sole guidance offered to lenders in
making this potentially life-changing choice are the borrowers’ ‘pages’ on the site, which can
include text, pictures, videos, maps, links, and personal information.
While borrowers ostensibly control this content, Kiva’s Field Partners and Kiva volunteers
‘edit and translate borrower stories’ (Kiva.org, 2013b). In practice, this leads borrower pages
to have a uniform quality, offering a standardized set of tropes and personal details including
age, marital status, and family members. Finite words are used to describe borrowers, including
‘responsible’, ‘hard working’, ‘ambitious’, and ‘good reputation’. For transparency, most pro-
files include the loan amount, loan term, repayment status, business expenses, and the loan’s
purpose. The profile for Amina from Kyrgyzstan is typical:
Amina is 64, widowed and has four children. Her elder son is engaged in taxi services and theyounger one is her main helper in her trading business. She started it in 2004 with initial capitalof 5000 KGS and managed to raise her floating capital to 40,000 KGS. (Kiva.org, 2011b)
A borrowing group from Mexico called ‘En Camino al Exito’ (On the Path to Success) has
chosen this name because ‘its members work hard every day to achieve success in their
business’. They describe themselves as follows: ‘The group is located in the State of Hidalgo
and has nine members. Guadalupe is the group’s treasurer. She is 30 years old, studied up to
high school level, and has an 11 year-old daughter’ (Kiva.org, 2011c).
As is typical of the flattening of borrowers through superficial attributes, the above examples
offer no information about Kyrgyzstan or Mexico, where the borrowers live, those countries’
SAP struggles, or issues of patriarchy or other relevant cultural dynamics. These leveling rep-
resentations simultaneously evoke and erase the geographically situated power inequalities
impacting these borrowers’ experiences.
This tendency is particularly obvious in the case of Haydar from Iraq whose profile reads: ‘He
is 26 years old, married and lives with eight family members. Four of his family members work.
In 2007, Haydar opened a cafeteria. He has a good reputation and he is well known in his area’
(Kiva.org, 2011d). Interestingly, the faces of all borrowers in Iraq have been blanked out, with
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the explanation: ‘Based on the political and social challenges of Iraq, personally identifiable
attributes of this entrepreneur have been altered to protect him or her’ (Kiva.org, 2011d).
While Kiva.org mentions Iraq’s ‘political and social challenges’—an unusual contextualizing
statement on the site—no information is given on local, political, or economic matters; on US
military intervention and the ensuing instability; the wave of neoliberal policies; or how these
issues impact Haydar’s microcredit experiences.
An ‘About the Country’ section displaying a map and aggregate financial information
(average annual income, exchange rate, etc.) appears below the borrower’s profile, alongside
Field Partner information (see, e.g. ‘About Pakistan’ at http://www.kiva.org/lend/900773).
Only financial information is offered, however, including the organization’s risk rating, interest
rates, and delinquency and default rates. No details are given on the Field Partner’s microcredit
approach, the influence of international aid organizations, or relationships among Field Partners,
borrowers, and governments. Again, Kiva.org walls off the relevant microcredit geographies
behind financial data that is largely irrelevant to the individual borrower.
Kiva.org also creates a flat and placeless worldview through borrower profile pictures. Photos
allow the lender to gaze onto such seemingly benign but loaded personal indicators as the bor-
rower’s skin color, gender, age, family roles, native dress, and exotic backgrounds. Some pic-
tures provide a head or body shot while others display the ‘entrepreneur’ near their business
or merchandise (see, e.g. http://www.kiva.org/lend/897893). Showing the head or body can indi-
vidualize and decontextualize borrowers, displacing them from local contingencies and into the
singular ‘entrepreneur’/borrower role. Displaying the body in relationship to the business
venture or merchandise places the borrower within the primary identity of a business person,
where the problems and solutions to poverty are simple—through entrepreneurship.
That Kiva.org and its borrowers would present appealing images for potential lenders is not
surprising, yet this flattening comes at a cost. By avoiding messy questions that should accom-
pany microcredit loans—Will the loan plunge its recipient further into debt? Will a spouse
appropriate the loan proceeds?—these borrower profiles do more than simply erase important
geographies. They foster a ‘god’s eye view’ of microcredit, Kiva.org, lenders, and borrowers,
where such questions are not only irrelevant, but unthinkable.
Conclusion: Why Does Kiva’s Flat World Matter?
We offer this view of Kiva.org’s paradoxically flat geographies to illustrate the costs of its failure
to support the guarantees implicit in its twin philanthropic innovations. When Kiva.org obscures
the power relationships underlying microcredit, it depoliticizes how ‘anti-poverty’ microloan
programs serve agendas that can produce poverty. And when Kiva.org misrepresents the
ability of its web-interface as a tool for meaningfully connecting people to engage in develop-
ment, it both naturalizes the ongoing extractive financialization of poverty, while potentially
facilitating small loans that can exacerbate the disadvantage of borrowers.
The first of these risks—that Kiva.org naturalizes a host of fraught projects including the cre-
ation of new forms of poverty debt, the liberalization of the financial sector, and the marketization
of the aid industry—is well established. By reframing a form of dependence and domination as a
tool for personal empowerment and poverty alleviation, Kiva.org adroitly obscures the ways neo-
liberal marketization of the poor facilitates the reassertion of class dominance (Harvey, 2005).
That said, the geographies obscured by Kiva.org, are not simply those of emergent forms of capi-
talist accumulation by dispossession. Rather, as Soederberg has argued, an ongoing debt narrative
‘acts to conceal the underlying relations of power: that is, inequality in all its forms, including
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gender, class, race and caste, exploitation, domination and resistance’ (2013, p. 537). Kiva not
only renders its own workings unproblematic, but also justifies the worldwide expansion of micro-
credit by much larger conventional aid and financial organizations.
Kiva.org’s failure to meet its second guarantee of meaningful lender–borrower connections
imposes equally substantial risks, especially because Kiva.org is the forum where most non-
professionals engage with microcredit. By obscuring the geographic contexts of microlending
and borrowers, Kiva.org squanders an essential opportunity to engage the public with the
ongoing conversation about poverty, debt, development, and the roots of contemporary inequal-
ity. Kiva.org’s portal enables lenders to ‘both distance themselves from any potentially harmful
effects on the borrower (i.e., risks) at the same time that they feel a connection to that individual
borrower located at a vast geographical remove and across divides of class or gender’ (Moodie,
2013, p. 280). This illusory sense of connection displaces other voices and perspectives. Given
the ever-increasing competition for individuals’ time and attention spans, it is hard to imagine
the average lender going much beyond Kiva.org in order to engage further with poverty and
inequality. Thus, Kiva encourages those who want to help to inadvertently exchange the capacity
to ‘do good’ with an unrealistic sense of ‘feeling good’.
In transferring decision-making authority to lenders while simultaneously denying them a
meaningful understanding of borrowers’ geographic contexts, Kiva positions lenders seeking
to ‘empower people around the world’ to subject those same people to heightened risks of dom-
estic violence (Gobezie, 2010), social ostracism or disempowerment (Elyachar, 2005; Li, 2007;
Milgram, 2005), and intensified patriarchal norms (Goertz & Gupta, 1996). Ultimately,
Kiva.org’s efforts to promote micro-level debt as the answer to macro-level structural disadvan-
tage contributes to, ‘a social pathology in the global economy, where impoverished communities
become the objects on which large aid agencies, DIY-ers, individual donors and celebrity aid
campaigners map their desires and longings’ (Nair, 2013, p. 632).
Several limits of this study arise from our exclusive focus on Kiva.org’s geographical rep-
resentations. First, because this study focuses on the Kiva.org site itself, we cannot address
what steps, if any, the organization or its Field Partners take to address issues of power inequality
and the damaging impacts of debt. Second, the nature of this study leaves an important question
it raises unanswered: namely how have specific Kiva.org-enabled loans and programs positively
and/or negatively impacted its borrowers, a question still unaddressed by the literature. Accord-
ingly, we would commend the actual processes by which Kiva.org identifies and monitors its
Field Partners and the loans they make as an important and rich field for further study. Likewise,
an actual examination of the impacts that Kiva.org-enabled loans have made in the real, very
much un-flat world is long overdue.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 In contrast, microfinance involves a variety of financial services—including loans, savings, and insurance services—to
previously economically marginalized populations with the goal of enabling development (Fisher & Sriram, 2002).
Throughout this study, we use microcredit to refer both to small loans to the poor and microfinance programs
because it is unclear whether Kiva.org’s field partners actually offer the broader set of microfinance services. We
occasionally use the term microlending to aid in readability.
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2 The only major rival to Kiva.org.—the Ebay owned, peer-to-peer, for-profit microfinance investment site,
MicroPlace.com—had only attracted 10,000 investors as of March 2011 and ceased taking new investments, or
allowing reinvestment of existing funds as of January 2014.
3 We use the ‘flat’ earth metaphor to evoke Friedman’s (2006) often critiqued, The world is flat, which argues that
elements of globalization are rapidly rendering the world’s peripheral regions increasingly economically and
technologically integrated.
4 For this analysis, we assume Kiva.org actually directs loans to borrowers that specific lenders choose. We do so
recognizing an unresolved dispute between critics who suggest that Kiva.org, not individual lenders, actually
decides who receives loans (Strom, 2009), and the organization which vigorously denies these charges (Barry,
2012). Either way, our critique remains that Kiva.org provides its lenders a robust appearing, but ultimately
illusory sense of connection to borrowers and the geographies that impact their experiences with microcredit.
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John Carr is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental
Studies at the University of New Mexico. His research and teaching focuses on the politics of
urban public space, with a focus on law and urban planning processes. His research has appeared
in Urban Geography, Environment & Planning: A, and Action Research Journal.
Elizabeth Dickinson is an Assistant Professor of Communication in the Kenan-Flagler Business
School and an affiliate in the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology (CEE) at the Univer-
sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching are in the areas of critical inter-
cultural communication, environmental communication, and gender. Her work has appeared in
Communication, Culture & Critique, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and
Culture, Howard Journal of Communications, and Journal of Consumer Culture.
Sara L. McKinnon is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture in the Depart-
ment of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and teach-
ing are in the areas of intercultural rhetoric, transnational studies, and legal rhetoric. Her essays
have appeared in Women’s Studies in Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, and the
Quarterly Journal of Speech.
Karma R. Chavez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and
affiliate in the Program in Chican@ and Latin@ Studies and the Department of Gender and
Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is coeditor of Standing in the
intersection: Feminist voices, feminist practices (with Cindy L. Griffin, SUNY Press, 2012),
and author of Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities (University
of Illinois Press, 2013). She is also a member of the radical queer collective Against Equality, an
organizer for LGBT Books to Prisoners, and a host of the radio program, ‘A Public Affair’ on
Madison’s community radio station, 89.9 FM WORT.
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