Humanitarian Communication in Person-to-Person Online Microfinance (original) (raw)

Using the example of microfinance – the provision of small-scale financial services to poor people – we argue for a form of everyday humanitarianism that constitutes Northern publics as microfinance supporters. This humanitarianism works through the mobilization of affective investments, which are financial, social and emotional commitments to distant others to alleviate their poverty through microloans. Within this economy of affect, microfinance appeals to its supporters through images of smiling women entrepreneurs, through its obligatory success story of development with the help of microenterprise, and through mediated encounters with micro-borrowers through online lending platforms. One of the most successful of these websites, particularly in the US, has been Kiva.org, which was established in San Francisco in 2005 and has since grown to include more than 1 million lenders and borrowers, facilitating loans of more than 600 million US dollars. In our presentation, we compare the mediated space created on the Kiva.org website with the seemingly more direct and personal – albeit still technologically-linked – connections established via Kiva Zip, which is a mobile phone platform that lets lenders communicate directly with their borrowers in the US and Kenya. Examining the interactions among lenders and borrowers on the website and on the zip platform, we analyse the affordances of mobile technologies for affective investment and for everyday humanitarian communication.