The Islamic Holy Month of Ramadan in Palestine is a highly anticipated, spiritual, and sometimes lazy time of year. Some businesses, anticipating the obligatory 16-hour fasting this year (from... Continue Reading >>
Stories tagged with Palestine
The Islamic Holy Month of Ramadan in Palestine is a highly anticipated, spiritual, and sometimes lazy time of year. Some businesses, anticipating the obligatory 16-hour fasting this year (from... Continue Reading >>
Compiled by Isabel Balderrama | KF17 | Ecuador
Welcome to this week’s Update from the Field! In the past few days we’ve had blog posts come to us from all corners of the world. From hearing about the prevailing Nomadic lifestyles of the people of Mongolia, to Kenya, where we journey along on an adventure-filled trip to meet a Kiva borrower in person. After touching down on Palestine and meeting a group of women that have successfully formed a cooperative, we are whisked away to the islands of Samoa where we are treated to two excellent videos illustrating life...
Continue Reading >>Philip Issa | KF17 | Palestine
In my last post, I examined the extent to which the lending programs of Kiva’s Palestinian partners FATEN and Ryada can be said to empower women. One characteristic that both programs share is that they only make individual loans. But microfinance doesn’t have to be done at the individual level, and there can be significant advantages to adopting a group lending approach to empower marginalized social groups. With this in mind, I’m excited to introduce you to the Deir Bzei Women’s Cooperative. They’ve leveraged...
Continue Reading >>Compiled by Philip Issa | KF17 | Palestine
We’ve all had these moments: Trying to impress a native speaker with our ability to speak their language, we compose an elegant sentence in our minds, open our mouths, and… proceed to swallow our feet whole. Indeed, we Kiva Fellows have had no shortage of these incidents – we’ve twisted and tortured whole phrases so that they come out no better suited than to embarrass and offend.
So here are a few stories of us Fellows shattering our carefully constructed, professional identities with a spectacular...
Continue Reading >>Compiled by Isabel Balderrama | KF17 | Ecuador
Having been in the field for a little over three months now, KF-17 fellows’ posts begin taking a retrospective look at what has been accomplished over the past few months while working with their assigned Kiva partners worldwide. From having played a role in getting a new kind of Kiva partnership up and running to working with two...
Continue Reading >>Philip Issa | KF17 | Palestine
A couple of years ago, Mohammed Al-Shawaf, a Kiva Fellow serving in Palestine previous to me, wrote a thoughtful post on the complexities of implementing a women’s empowerment agenda through microfinance. Having served my placement at the same MFIs as him, I’ve had the opportunity to learn more about FATEN and Ryada’s women empowerment initiatives and implementations. The two institutions are far apart in their models, with each carrying associated benefits and disadvantages. I also had the opportunity to meet with a women...
Continue Reading >>Compiled by Michael Slattery | KF17 | Togo
Despite the often upbeat tone of fellows’ posting on the blog, I’ll be the first to admit that the position entails some universal hardships. There is the occasional social isolation that leaves you Saturday night at home with a book and bottle of the local plonk, despite apparently leading a life of swinging exoticism and sun-drenched adventure. There’s is a lot of driving around, waiting, driving some more, and then getting told some tall tales by people who look at you like you’re definitely one of those foreign imbeciles that...
Continue Reading >>Compiled by Chris Paci | KF16 & KF17 | Ukraine
As regular readers of Kiva Stories from the Field will know, it’s not always easy to extend microfinance services to the people who need them most. Aside from the usual barriers - poor infrastructure that makes it difficult to connect borrowers with an MFI, the difficulty of disseminating information about available services, and the...
Continue Reading >>Philip Issa | KF17 | Palestine (Update: Photo links fixed)
Now that Spring time is in full bloom here in Palestine, the truths about a pair misconceptions I held before arriving have become unavoidable. First, that the ecology here is actually quite conducive to agriculture, and second, that most of the West Bank is in fact not under the jurisdiction of Palestinians.
I had originally intended to write only about my surprise about how green the land can be in Spring, but I believe that such a post would be dishonest. It...
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