The Big Question
Is there a way to measure the social impact of a micro-loan?
Kivuntu attempts to answer this very tough question because Wikipedia doesn't.
Given the unprecedented move by Kiva.org to open up their loan data to the public, we hope to take a tentative step in deriving a simple (perhaps crude) yet useful measure of the potential social impact of a requested micro-loan to the borrower.
Our hope is to provide you an objective measure that will assist you in choosing potential borrowers. (On a side note, we thought it would be cool if we could be the Bill James of Kiva.)
The Formula
To determine social impact we use the following simple formula:
In plain words, we reduce the loan amount to a percentage of the GDP per capita at Purchasing Power Parity of the borrower's country. This allows us to compare loan sizes across countries. *UPDATE* We have removed the division by the number of borrowers per loan in order to increase the score bias towards social cooperation and possibly adjust for single borrowers who may hire others but are not listing them on the loan applicaiton.
The assumption here is that the larger the loan with respect to the GDP, the greater the business opportunity and perhaps the cash flow of the business.
However, this by itself is not sufficient, since the duration of the loan plays a critical part. The shorter the scheduled duration of the loan, the greater the anticipated cash flow of the business and the quicker we can expect to have the loan money repaid and hence re-loaned providing even greater social good.
Parting Words
As Julia Childs wisely said, "Everything in moderation, including moderation." We hope that you find this site useful, so useful that you put it on Twitter. But we also understand its limitations, so we'd like to tell you that this is just one tool (out of many) you can use to base your decision.
Let us know what you think!
-Siavosh & Paul
kivuntu@gmail.com
