Here’s a pop quiz question: how do you find a borrower in rural Kosovo?
How about when no one has their address, and the loan officer handling their case has left the microfinance partner organization you’re working with?
Part of a Kiva Fellow’s job is to conduct something called a borrower verification, or BV. A BV is an audit of sorts; fellows are tasked with tracking down ten borrowers and checking to make sure that the information that Kiva has on file matches reality.
The tricky part is that borrowers can be difficult to find. This is particularly true in Kosovo, where, if granted the proper immigration status, people will leave for other parts of Europe to seek a better life. The first list of borrowers I received from Kiva turned out to have four people on it who no longer lived in Kosovo.
The second list contained a few borrowers whose exact location was unknown. One of the borrowers took us six hours to find; the following pictures are from that day.
So how do you find a hard-to-find borrower? You go to the general region they live in— you’ll have the village name, if you’re lucky— and ask everyone you can. You'll ask farmers, gas station attendants, women selling handicrafts on the streets, children, old men on strolls, and neighbors. You’ll probably get conflicting information, so you'll take your best guess on the reliability of your sources (did that farmer seem like he knew what he was talking about?). You give different meandering roads a shot, knock on many doors, and eventually you’ll find the person you’re looking for. And the person will be so genuine and wonderful that you’ll forget all about the hours it took to find them; you’ll sit down for coffee and learn their story, and the journey will seem like a distant memory. The moment will feel like a true triumph.
And then, of course, you'll have to find the next one, and the adventure will start all over again. But no matter how many doors you have to knock on before you find the one you’re looking for, it’ll be worth it. I promise.
About the author
Annie Lydens
Annie grew up in Singapore and Japan before moving to the U.S. to attend Pomona College in Claremont, California. At Pomona, she studied Politics, Philosophy, and Economics. During college, she worked on a congressional campaign, helped rally support for the DREAM Act, and held internships at a women’s economic empowerment nonprofit in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., and at the U.S. Mission to NATO in Brussels, Belgium. After graduating, she worked at a startup in San Francisco before accepting a fellowship with New Sector Alliance to work on a research study examining the state of philanthropy in the tech sector. Annie will be working with Kiva in Kosovo and Albania, and is very excited to be able to work directly with Kiva’s enterprising borrowers. Annie loves to run, draw things, and go places she’s never been before.