What do 403 people from New Jersey to Croatia to the Philippines have in common? They’re all Friends of Bob Harris, a lending team with Kiva, a microfinance organization. So far, they’ve loaned just over $378,000 to entrepreneurs around the world without access to traditional banking systems.
So who is this guy, Bob Harris, and why does he have so many generous friends? It’s hard to pin him down from his resume. Among other things, Bob has been a stand-up comedian, a producer on a Mexican soap opera, a Jeopardy champion and a successful author. During a stint in Dubai as a travel writer for Forbes magazine, he witnessed some serious financial inequity. “I was being paid to stay in these insane, gold-plated 5 star hotels while people were sweating 14 and 16 hour days outside in 110 degree heat to build them, living in near slave conditions to boot. It didn’t seem right somehow,” he says.
Then he remembered a group he had heard about at a convention held by the Tides Foundation. Premal Shah, president of Kiva, described how the organization collects small donations from a lot of people and uses them to make modest loans to people in poorer countries who are trying to improve their lives by starting businesses. Loan recipients range from a woman in Peru starting an auto repair shop to a group of men in Rwanda opening a convenience store. The average loan amount is just under $400, hardly enough for a month’s rent in the U.S., but good starting capital for Kiva borrowers. Kiva takes no percentage of the loans. It relies on grants and other donations for its organizational costs.
Kiva started as the brainchild of San Francisco computer programmers Matt Flannery and Jennifer Jackley in 2004. By April of 2005, they were online and lending to their first seven entrepreneurs. The founders were under 30 at the time. Flannery left his job that December to become Kiva’s CEO. Why make loans instead of simply giving money? “Lending to somebody sends the message that you’re treating them as an equal,” says Flannery. “It’s a really dignified way to interact with people.” As of March 2011, Kiva has loaned out over 200 million dollars. The repayment rate of their loans is 98.6 %.
Bob had found the perfect way to give back. The money he earned from Forbes became his first loan. On its website, Kiva encourages lenders to form lending groups and recruit friends. Bob created the aptly named “Friends of Bob Harris” group in 2009. It has since swelled to its current membership of 403 and is still growing. Just this month, the group has loaned over $50,000, which places them third for the month behind the Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious group and, ironically, the Kiva Christians. Not bad considering that the two top groups number nearly 15,000 and 7,000 respectively.
His association with Kiva has inspired a new career path for Bob. He is currently travelling around the world, visiting Kiva borrowers to hear their stories and incorporate them into his next book, “The 1st International Bank of Bob,” due to be published later this year. He also gives speeches about Kiva and microfinance and blogs about his travels on his website, bobharris.com. In his blog, the feeling Bob expresses most often is gratitude, for the kindness and hospitality shown by his hosts, who are often desperately poor but gladly welcome some American stranger into their homes. He feels that “if we switched places with the recipients (of Kiva loans), they’d loan to us just as happily.” That fundamental optimism has inspired a few hundred people to join in and start lending. For an investment of as little as $25, the Friends of Bob Harris can participate in a larger effort to help people all over the world make their future a little more hopeful.
