Ari brought this up again in the comments section this morning. How can our Kiva Investment Group be more useful to us…and to our entrepreneurs? Several of you have raised the idea of a group investment. Pick a borrower that we are all interested in and invest together. What do you think?
I know Ramon is focused on Latin America while I am interested in the poorest countries on earth – which are concentrated for the most part in sub-Saharan Africa. Others may have their own investment focuses. So we’d have to agree to put our strategies aside for the good of the group, if that turned out to be necessary. Which would be okay with me.
Here’s another simple idea. If one of us notices a potential borrower is having trouble completing their loan, she could put up a message here asking fellow PIG-KIGs to jump on it. And, as finances permit, we would all agree ahead of time to do that.
Or, as a group we could take on the stalest, least pretty borrowers out there. I can tell you right now they are all are grumpy middle-aged Muslim men in Azerbaijan who sell spare parts or run a junkyard. Why can’t they be winning little 23 year old yam sellers like the borrower I just helped fund in Ghana?
Because they’re grouchy old guys like me! At least they’re not lazy pigs. Strike a blow for grumpy old men! Join KIG!
My original idea was simply to use the Kiva Investment Group to encourage other readers to join us. That’s working, but we seem to be ready to take the group a step farther. More ideas and discussion, please.
If you read all this and have no idea what I’m jiving about, click on the Kiva ad in the upper right corner.
Image credit: Friends of Freddy
Labels: Kiva Investment Group
ponderingpig.wordpress.com 
At first pass, I believe establishing a group or “foundation” investment fund is a very good idea that could be quite effective. Completing a slowly developing loan funding for a particular business, or perhaps even fully funding a desired loan, will enable the funded ventures to hit the ground running sooner rather than later. To a successful, thriving business, “Time,” as they say, “is money”; to an emerging or under-capitalized business “Money is time.”As Ramon correctly pointed out, however, the foundation model of investing is not without certain administrative problems. I personally have no concerns about the trustworthiness of anyone who is involved with the Kiva Investment Group as it is presently constituted, and I say that without knowing any of them. But I do know they are, in fact, members of the Kiva Investment Group, and that says something. At least it says something to me. My main concern is that because the individual investment group members quite naturally have differing personal investment parameters and strategies, and there is such a huge range of investing opportunities, how difficult might it be for everyone to agree on a single, perhaps significant investment?I’m gonna think on this some more.Greg
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Hey Ramon, did you see the new loan requests from rice farmers in Ecuador? Mifex just set up a banking system for them, very cool. I’ll lend if you do 🙂
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My petty first-world complaint of the week: I wish Kiva would sign me in automatically when I go to the site, like Gmail does and lots of other sites you have to log into… I’ve started accessing my account a lot more these days and it gets tiring to enter my login info every time. Admittedly, Windows “remembers” this for me, so I really only have to type “a” and then select my email from the drop down menu, then the info appears like magic. I’ll just go to bed now.
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Hello Mr Pig,I stumbled across Kiva today on the web and think it looks great. What other things on the web like this, are you interested in?The reason I ask is that I work at The Economist on a web innovation project. We’ve got six months to come up with a great idea that ‘makes a difference’. So if you’ve got any suggestions then please go to http://www.projectredstripe.com. For a more personal look at it then my blog has its own manifesto.Best,Tom
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wow, this Laurent guy in Belgium is amazing, he’s loaned to 240 people ! http://www.kiva.org/lender/laurent5933 he should totally join KIG. It would be nice if Kiva lenders could contact one another.
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