Kiva's Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace

Abstract

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 inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts 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, Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor people's disadvantage in the coercive form of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty through Kiva.org's lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic development aid and intervention.

Keywords:

• microfinance
• microcredit
• development
• peer-to-peer
• kiva.org
• cyberspace

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In contrast, microfinance involves a variety of financial services—including loans, savings, and insurance services—to previously economically marginalized populations with the goal of enabling development (Fisher & Sriram, 2002). Throughout this study, we use microcredit to refer both to small loans to the poor and microfinance programs because it is unclear whether Kiva.org's field partners actually offer the broader set of microfinance services. We occasionally use the term microlending to aid in readability.

2 The only major rival to Kiva.org.—the Ebay owned, peer-to-peer, for-profit microfinance investment site, MicroPlace.com—had only attracted 10,000 investors as of March 2011 and ceased taking new investments, or allowing reinvestment of existing funds as of January 2014.

3 We use the ‘flat’ earth metaphor to evoke Friedman's (2006) often critiqued, The world is flat, which argues that elements of globalization are rapidly rendering the world's peripheral regions increasingly economically and technologically integrated.

4 For this analysis, we assume Kiva.org actually directs loans to borrowers that specific lenders choose. We do so recognizing an unresolved dispute between critics who suggest that Kiva.org, not individual lenders, actually decides who receives loans (Strom, 2009), and the organization which vigorously denies these charges (Barry, 2012). Either way, our critique remains that Kiva.org provides its lenders a robust appearing, but ultimately illusory sense of connection to borrowers and the geographies that impact their experiences with microcredit.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Carr

John Carr is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico. His research and teaching focuses on the politics of urban public space, with a focus on law and urban planning processes. His research has appeared in Urban Geography, Environment & Planning: A, and Action Research Journal.

Elizabeth Dickinson

Elizabeth Dickinson is an Assistant Professor of Communication in the Kenan-Flagler Business School and an affiliate in the Curriculum for the Environment and Ecology (CEE) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research and teaching are in the areas of critical intercultural communication, environmental communication, and gender. Her work has appeared in Communication, Culture & Critique, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Howard Journal of Communications, and Journal of Consumer Culture.

Sara L. McKinnon

Sara L. McKinnon is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric, Politics, and Culture in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research and teaching are in the areas of intercultural rhetoric, transnational studies, and legal rhetoric. Her essays have appeared in Women's Studies in Communication, Text and Performance Quarterly, and the Quarterly Journal of Speech.

Karma R. Chávez

Karma R. Chávez is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and affiliate in the Program in Chican@ and Latin@ Studies and the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is coeditor of Standing in the intersection: Feminist voices, feminist practices (with Cindy L. Griffin, SUNY Press, 2012), and author of Queer migration politics: Activist rhetoric and coalitional possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013). She is also a member of the radical queer collective Against Equality, an organizer for LGBT Books to Prisoners, and a host of the radio program, ‘A Public Affair’ on Madison's community radio station, 89.9 FM WORT.