Here in Mongolia, my top priority with XacBank has been to complete borrower verifications (BVs)—visits to 10 randomly selected Kiva clients to ensure that everything in the field checks out with the information reported to Kiva’s San Francisco headquarters. As it happened, the borrowers in my sample were...
Continue Reading >>Stories tagged with XacBank
Spring has arrived in Mongolia! That means warmer weather (afternoons creeping closer and closer to the double digits)… and, of course, baby animals!
I had the opportunity to travel to Selenge ...
Continue Reading >>Jon Hiebert | KF 17 | Mongolia
This family was surprisingly connected. They showed me that the solar panel could charge their cell phones, and yes, they have reception here!
As we drove hundreds of kilometers on this “Mongolian highway” (dirt road), the only thing that broke the vast nothingness was animals and the occasional ger (Mongolian nomadic tent). We were headed to a city called Kherlen in the Eastern Mongolian province of Dornod, where I was scheduled to check in with five borrowers to verify some information.
While bumping...
Continue Reading >>Jon Hiebert | KF 17 | Mongolia
I woke up on Friday morning just like every other morning. Slightly pleased with the late start of 9:00 a.m., I still felt awkward getting dressed in my business suit. Then I enjoyed my Choco Chips cereal with milk in bed while getting mentally prepared for another day of laptop projects.
Lookin’ good but a little anxious in my suit.
To get to the office, I walked the tiled sidewalks only recently freed from a four-month coat of ice. I went upstairs, set up my Macbook in Transcapital‘s clean, newly-...
Continue Reading >>Jon Hiebert | KF 17 | Mongolia
When looking for an apartment in a new city, common sense would guide you to look online, contact a realtor or network through ex-pats and friends that work and live in the area already. But common sense seems to be very relative here in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia…
“I’ll take you for a walk to some areas where you might want to live,” says Ron, a new friend of mine who wants to help us hunt for apartments.
“Sure,” I reply, thinking it would be good to get an idea of what places looked like and what...
Continue Reading >>As you may know, since August 2009, XacBank has offered Kiva borrowers an incentive to pay their loan principal and interest back on time – an interest rebate in a savings account! If a Kiva borrower pays back on time, then XacBank deposits 9 percent of the interest the borrower has paid on their loan into a savings account. As a Kiva Fellow, I have worked with XacBank to update their policies regarding how Kiva borrowers are considered eligible for interest rebates and simplify how the MFI offers the savings accounts to new Kiva borrowers.
... Continue Reading >>A borrower verification is a thorough check of ten random Kiva borrowers of a field partner. It’s used to verify the accuracy of the information published on the borrower profiles on the Kiva website. A borrower verification happens several times throughout the course of a partnership in order to assess a microfinance institution’s performance levels. Read below about the ten borrowers I visited through a borrower verification with XacBank. Click through the picture to read the full loan update for each borrower....
Continue Reading >>A Kiva Coordinator is someone who organizes and manages the Kiva program at one of Kiva’s field partners. Watch the video to find out what a Kiva Coordinator does everyday, their favorite aspects of working with Kiva, and also the challenges of being a Kiva Coordinator. As a Roaming Fellow, I had the opportunity to interview three Mongolian field partners – XacBank, Credit Mongol, and Transcapital....
Continue Reading >>The winter technically began on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year – December 22. Although from October, families have been making fires to keep warm and temperatures have been well below freezing for some time. Now, we’re in the fourth set of nines in the Mongolian winter, the coldest set! I woke up this morning to -33 degree Fahrenheit temperatures in the capital city. In the countryside, it’s even colder! One of the coldest provinces, Uvs, is -41 degrees Fahrenheit today, without factoring in the wind chill. Here’s the breakdown of the 9 Nines:
- The...
By Amber Barger, KF13, Mongolia.
Recently, I was able to travel to the countryside and combine many of my Kiva Fellow duties into one trip. With XacBank, I traveled to Uvurkhangai and Bayankhongor Provinces together with the Kiva Coordinator. We interviewed Kiva entrepreneurs, attended trade fairs, trained loan officers, and participated in a very special certificate ceremony – all in four days!
... Continue Reading >>