Kiva Interest Rate Finder

September 27, 2013 6:44 PM

Kiva Interest Rate Finder
Kiva allows people to fund microfinance loans through Field Partners. Some Kiva Partners charge the equivalent of 109% APR. That is incredibly high. Kiva doesn't make it easy to find the partners that charge borrowers 0% or low interest, so I made a script to do so.

I ran this same script a year ago, and was happy to see there were many more Kiva partners making low-interest loans. On the other hand, one year ago the partner with the highest Portfolio Yield was 82%, and now it is even higher.

Role: programmer

posted by rajbot (3 comments total)

This project was posted to MetaFilter by aniola on October 4, 2013: Kiva Interest Rate Finder

Some people love Kiva, and some people think Kiva and/or microfinance is not a good idea. I should point out that I'm now in the second camp and don't advocate using Kiva, even when funding 0% loans.

I wrote this script because I had a small amount of money in Kiva, and I decided to see if there was something I could get behind instead of pulling my money out. Even with the list of lenders that don't charge interest, it took a long time before I found any that had any active projects that needed funding.
posted by rajbot at 10:16 PM on September 27, 2013

Is it possible to use the script to search not just lenders, but active projects of lenders charging below a certain interest threshold? It sounds like you spent a lot of time manually searching for projects -- is this not automatable?
posted by amtho at 8:35 AM on October 6, 2013

Today there was only one woman with a loan that charges less than a department store credit card, from an agency that has 4 to 5 stars. Your work helped me find her. Thank you!
posted by Houstonian at 6:31 PM on January 21, 2014