KIVA LENDING
As I explored the Kiva website, I was excited to find out that Kiva offered some of its data on lenders and borrowers to download for free. After playing around with the data on Kiva borrowers, I was interested in learning more about the lenders and where they are from. After cleaning the data sets and exploring them, I observed certain trends about the regions where lenders are situated.*
It is no surprise that the U.S., the country where Kiva was founded and a nation with a high GDP and large population, is the country with most lenders by far. However, I was surprised about how wide the gap was between the U.S. and the rest of countries. The number of lenders from the U.S. is even larger than all the other countries combined. The map below shows all countries where lenders are from, with the darkest shades of green representing countries with more lenders. The bar graph below shows the first 67 countries where Kiva lenders are from. In the following bubble graph, each bubble represents a country and the colors represent different continents. The map and bubble chart allows user to view the country and number of lenders by hovering over each country or bubble. The bubble chart also allows the user to filter and omit any country or continent to see what the proportion looks like without a specific region. It is evident from all of these graphs below that the U.S. is the outlier in terms of lenders. It is no surprise that the countries following the U.S. are all countries with high GDPs, such as Canada and Australia, followed by some European nations.
The bar graph below shows the number of lenders by continent. The large gap by continents between North America and the rest of the continents is heavily due to the fact that the U.S. is an outlier, and that Canada is the second country with most lenders. It is no surprise that Europe is the second continent with the largest number of lenders. However, there is a significant gap between North America and Europe.
When divided by continents, it appears that Europe is the one continent where several countries have a relatively large number of lenders, as 12 Countries have over 2,000 lenders. On the other hand, in Asia only Japan and India have over 1,000 lenders.
In all of Latin America and the Caribbean there was only one country with over 1,000 lenders, Brazil, followed by Mexico with 955. In Central America and the Caribbean, the country with the highest number of lenders was Costa Rica, although it ranked 38th worldwide based on the total number of lenders. As it is evident from the following map and previous graphs, there is a very large gap between the number of lenders from the U.S. and the rest of countries in the Americas.
In Africa there were no countries with more than 1,000 lenders, and the country with the largest amount of lenders by far was South Africa with 462 lenders. Within Oceania, the clear outlier was Australia, where there were 22,781 lenders, followed by New Zealand with 2,498 lenders.
One of my favorite books I read recently was Factfulness (Rosling, Hans; Rosling, Ola; and Rosling Ronnlund Anna, 2018), where the authors show with recent data that we often have misconceptions of current economic, health, and other indicators in the developing world, our countries in levels 1-3, as the authors label them. According to the authors, many of us still see countries in those levels as if they have not changed, when the data clearly shows that life expectancy, health, education, and other indicators have improved throughout the last decades. As the authors show, countries in Asia, Latin America, and Africa have increased in their purchasing power and made improvements in many indicators throughout the last decades. For example, my home country of Peru, where, based on this analysis, there were only 100 Kiva lenders, now has an income per capita of $12,700 (see https://www.gapminder.org/whc/).
This is to say that I believe there is potential, not just in Peru, but other nations to increase the number of lenders. I have met many people while living or traveling abroad who often want to support others, but do not know how to or perhaps do not trust that their money will go to good use. I am aware that there are challenges in expanding the market to lenders in countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, but I believe that through different strategies, Kiva can reach people in other regions and expand the lender population .
* I was not able to determine the time period for the this data set. In some cases, some data elements were omitted as some cells for locations were blank.