Humanitarian Communication in Person-to-Person Online Microfinance (original) (raw)
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Development 2.0? : the case of Kiva.org and online social lending for development
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Kiva.org, Person-to-Person Lending, and the Conditions of Intercultural Contact
Howard Journal of Communication, 2013
Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an analysis of discourses that lenders use in their lender profiles to describe their motivations for lending. This article first provides background on Kiva International and the role of the Internet in addressing power inequalities, and then explains the methodological approach. Next, we reveal the themes that emerged in our analysis of lender profiles, addressing the ways that neoliberal discourses of individualism and personal responsibility guide lenders’ motivations for participating in Kiva.org's microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, arguing that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.
Kiva.org, person-to person lending, and the conditions of intercultural contact (2013)
Howard Journal of Communications, 2013
Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an analysis of discourses that lenders use in their lender profiles to describe their motivations for lending. This paper first provides background on Kiva International and the role of the Internet in addressing power inequalities, and then explains the methodological approach. Next, we reveal the themes that emerged in our analysis of lender profiles, addressing the ways that neoliberal discourses of individualism and personal responsibility guide lenders’ motivations for participating in Kiva.org’s microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, notably that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.
Scaling Inclusive Digital Innovation Successfully: The Case of Crowdfunding Social Enterprises
There is a growing interest in how organizations and initiatives that innovate to use information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) can scale their operations, reach and impact. This article takes a systemic and socio-technical approach to analyse the successful scaling of a crowdfunding social enterprise. It traces the growth of the ‘innofusion’ network of the world's first person-to-person microlending platform, with particular emphasis on practices of balancing along three dimensions: (1) the need for standardization to manage expansion across highly diverse geographical contexts and for adaptation, customization and diversification to produce locally meaningful impact; (2) online and offline strategies and (3) business and social aspects of the organization. Processes of techno-financial scaling made possible by organizational and technological innovation at the social enterprise, which is embedded in the San Francisco Bay Area's techno-entrepreneurial milieu, also enabled financial innovation among platform partners in developing countries.
Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the …, 2009
Online microfinance promotes and encourages entrepreneurship as well as creating informal relationships between lenders and clients using social networking technologies. While much of the existing literature describes the quantitative success of online microfinance, little attention has been given to the social processes through which this has been achieved. This short discussion will take an interdisciplinary approach, focusing on the role of narrative production in facilitating relationships between online lenders in more affluent countries and client entrepreneurs in developing countries, using experience drawn from initial fieldwork conducted in Cambodia. Better understanding the relationships between online lenders, clients and the intermediaries who document the activities of client entrepreneurs may be useful in the design, modification or implementation of effective technologies to better enable all actors in the delivery of online microfinance services.
Kiva's Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace
Globalizations, 2016
While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of “development from below” does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are both enabled by and enable various political, cultural, and economic practices and programs operating at scales ranging from the household to the transnational. These contexts, practices and programs are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the “fix” of microcredit remains universal. This “flat” approach is problematic for two reasons. First, rather than empowering meaningfully informed private philanthropy and development decisions, Kiva.org presents a highly problematic financialization of social relations as a positive and unquestionable good. Secondly, by giving development choices to lenders, while hiding the factors that make microcredit potentially destructive, Kiva.org enables the entrenchment of financialization practices at the heart of the transnational development industry.
Communication & Social Change, 1, 63-88., 2013
Using theoretical frameworks from Appadurai, (1990); Nakamura, (2008); and Gajjala and Birzescu, (2010), this study employs visual analysis to examine the communication processes used in acquiring loans for people of low socio-economic status in developing countries. Images and narratives on online microfinance site, kiva.org, were examined in this study. The results suggest that though online microfinance through web 2.0 communication technologies is helping the poor, by providing people who otherwise would not have access to loan products with financial services, many of the so-called “poorest of the poor” do not have direct access to global communication tools used to represent them on sites such as kiva. This study suggests that the representation of borrowers from developing countries is riddled with representational issues. Keywords: Kiva, microfinance, globalization, digital media, social change
Marketized philanthropy Kiva’s utopian ideology of entrepreneurial philanthropy
As the impact of market actors and their doctrines on philanthropy gradually increases, the debate between the proponents and the critics of ‘marketization’ of philanthropy intensifies. Curiously, the debate has largely centred on ‘philanthrocapitalists’ and philanthropic professionals, while less attention has been devoted to the ways in which the newly emergent philanthropic ideologies and practices are ‘marketed’ to and adopted by the broader audience of philanthropic givers. In response, we explore the ideological elements that make lending through Kiva, an emergent microfinance charity, meaningful to its creators and supporters. A combination of interpretive methods is used to outline Kiva’s ideology of entrepreneurial philanthropy. This utopian ideology is found to legitimize ‘marketized’ philanthropic practices by invoking alternative conceptions of poverty, social progress and philanthropy (i.e. representations of philanthropic giving, philanthropic benefactors and beneficiaries and the relations between them).