Help me distribute $100,000 to new entrepreneurs in Africa

Hi pilom, It was extremely difficult to send payments to individuals in pretty much all developing countries until about five years ago. Since then, mobile phone payment services, which allow funds to be sent via secure SMS message, have proliferated in a few countries, especially in Africa.

Kenya is at the center of the mobile phone payment revolution with its M-PESA service, and is the reason Zidisha was first piloted in Kenya. Thanks to M-PESA, Kenya is still our largest country today.

Most Zidisha loan payments are transferred via mobile phone. For example, we use M-PESA in Kenya to transfer funds from our US bank account electronically to a bank account in Kenya, and from there to the mobile phone M-PESA account of the recipient. The recipient can exchange the M-PESA credits for cash at a local M-PESA kiosk. We receive repayments the same way.

In countries where mobile payment services are less developed, such as Burkina Faso, we transfer payments by sending a disbursement order to the local bank account where our funds are held. This is a much less scalable solution than mobile phone payments, and is one reason our growth is more rapid in the countries - Kenya, Ghana, and Indonesia - where mobile phone-based payments are enabled.

Hi David, this is a complex question and I agree with you that a lot depends on the circumstances and details.

My understanding is that many cash transfer programs have had measurable positive economic effects, both when they are targeted and when they are offered to an entire community. And there are obviously situations of humanitarian catastrophe, such as a natural disaster or a famine, where direct distribution of aid is the right answer.

My objection to most handout programs is based on the negative psychological effects I experienced time and again while working with development assistance grants in Africa and Asia. The resources we distributed would certainly result in an economic boost, but they also fundamentally changed the way the recipients saw themselves, and the way we saw them. Handouts caused the recipients to view themselves as dependents whose fortunes were subject to the whims of luck and on pleasing donors, rather than on themselves as drivers of their own lives. When repeated enough, this psychological side effect can be devastating not only for the individual recipient, but for the broader community that has come to depend on the handouts.

The dynamics in microfinance loans are much healthier in my experience - especially in a market-oriented community like Zidisha, where borrowers offer their own loan terms and lenders base their lending decisions on the borrowers' own demonstrated performance with past loans. It feels more like a business partnership than a handout.

In the pilot studies, about 10% of people who would otherwise be working choose not to work and instead become dependent on the BI. So the BI pilot studies do agree with Julia's impression.

https://decorrespondent.nl/541/why-we-should-give-free-money...

The Namibia study is interesting, but it's essentially attacking a different problem from the one Kidisha aims to address (lack of access to relatively high sums by local standards to do specific things)

It's also unfortunately too short term and micro-scale to really address the main criticisms which are (i) prices of basic goods in short supply and ground rents will rise to the point very poor people are often not better off, and sometimes worse off (ii) trying to set the basic income sufficiently high to allow subsistence (which the Namibian study didn't) would cause massive economic instability even if it could effectively be funded (iii) without massive and relatively expensive administrative oversight, most of the money will be siphoned off by the corrupt in underdeveloped countries and regions and (iv) if you make payments for children you encourage even more excessive population growth and if you don't, families still suffer.

According to their FAQ [1], Zidisha is a charity, not a place to put your money if you want to get a return.

(It would be interesting to compare social-impact-per-dollar of Zidisha versus, e.g. GiveDirectly [2], one of the best-known ways of doing good in the developing world [3].)

[1]: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/faq.html - look for the question "Why does the Zidisha website not track the precise financial returns earned on my loans?"

[2]: http://givedirectly.org/

[3]: http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

Hi minimax, you are correct - if you lent at 5% interest with a 10% default rate, you would lose money.

Note that most borrowers offer interest well above 5%, and lenders are free to fund the loans at or below the offered rate. In my experience, many lenders have opted to fund at low or even zero interest because they wish to offer their selected entrepreneurs low-cost loans, rather than make a profit. The rate paid by the entrepreneur is more important to them than their own rate of return.

We don't interfere in our users' interest rate decisions, other than to limit the maximum interest to no more than 25%. Our platform accommodates all lending philosophies, from those who do not believe in charging interest to those who believe the best way to help entrepreneurs is to structure transactions in a way likely to generate positive financial returns for both lender and borrower.

minimax, the Zidisha statistics page significantly understates the amount the average lender will lose, which is in fact closer to 30-35%. The Zidisha stats page performance is steadily declining toward that end. In the hypothetical case you describe, making 10 loans of $1000 each, you would expect to make $500 in interest but lose about $3,000 in principle to default over a 12-month period. Individual results have been both somewhat better and worse than the 30% number.

Hi janj, I am not familiar with any place where debt is not used in some form or another. (See http://www.amazon.com/Portfolios-Poor-How-Worlds-Live/dp/069... for a really thorough exposition of the variety of debt strategies low-income households use to manage their finances.)

The main alternatives to debt that I am aware of are forms of Islamic financing, such as rent-to-own and profit-sharing models. We have explored the possibility of offering a profit-sharing financing product, but failed to come up with a feasible way of implementing such a model. The successful implementations of profit-sharing models seem to rely on strong information verification systems and intensive interaction with local staff, which we as an online service cannot offer.

Hi btilly, I am not an expert in property law in general. I understand it is a contentious issue in much of Latin America, Hernando De Soto's area of focus. I can tell you that many Zidisha borrowers do have formal legal title to farming plots and homes, but they do not use this property as collateral for loans because they cannot afford the risk of losing it.

More broadly, I do not think any one service - property reform, or business growth capital, or health or education for that matter - is a cure-all. All of these services are needed, and each works optimally when the others are present.

Hi smithm9, I also do not know of any study that definitively "proves" that microfinance alleviates poverty. I think one reason is that it is hard to decouple the effects of microfinance from the many random events that determine household income in developing countries. Another reason is the high interest rates charged by most traditional microfinance programs.

I have personally known many people who have dramatically improved their living standards thanks to Zidisha loans. Here is one example: https://www.zidisha.org/microfinance/loan/nbsarr/408.html (see the comment area for updates on the results of her loans).

Over and beyond measurable economic effects, I would argue that having access to the chance to raise affordable financing is transformative because it changes the way a person views the range of opportunities for advancement in life. For example, all Zidisha entrepreneurs know they can progress to raise up to $10,000 if they maintain a solid track record of repayments over time. Simply knowing that opportunity exists removes the ceiling people would otherwise put on their own ambitions. The result is intangible, but no less important because we cannot measure it.

We structured Zidisha as a nonprofit because our mission is genuinely philanthropic. Nobody is in it to make money. At heart, we are a cause-driven group of people and the nonprofit structure is a natural fit for that. Also, we do not want to be in a position where equity holders might oblige us to charge high fees to generate profits. Finally, our nonprofit status reinforces the message that lending through Zidisha is a philanthropic, not a financial investment activity.

Why do we accept donations to run our organization? We provide a valuable service to lenders in developing and maintaining the web platform and community that allows them to connect with the entrepreneurs they wish to support. We could charge lenders a fixed fee to cover the cost of this service, but we decided to structure it instead as an optional tip made while funding loans. The optional tip allows lenders who can afford more to donate generously.

Currently about half of our income comes from service fees paid by borrowers, and the rest comes from lender tips. We view both as payment for service we are providing, rather than a free handout.

That sounds reasonable. I suspect in time the market will probably head more toward the market rate.

25% is still pretty usurious.

Have you thought about establishing a minimum interest rate lenders can set to avoid indirectly contributing to the traditional trap of foreign aid?

Julia,

One thing to note is Kiva has been doing direct lending in Kenya for about 2 years now using M-PESA via Kiva Zip. Zidisha still has some differences, but I'm surprised at the confrontational tone a lot of Zidisha posts have taken towards Kiva. We're both trying to solve some of the same problems, would be great if instead of negativity, we could work together on doing that, share learnings etc. Anytime I get the chance, I share learnings or offer to help Watsi, and I'd like to think I could feel the same way towards Zidisha.

Kenya is also fairly unique on the continent, outside of South Africa, in that you can access pretty good internet. We pay attention to emerging markets for online services and we've noticed recently that Kenya is coming up strong in terms of demand.

It would be great to see more programs targeted at entrepreneurs from developing countries actually in those countries themselves. There seems to be a big gap in FDI in developing countries between support for lifting micropreneurs out of poverty and major infrastructure projects supported by multinationals or the World Bank, and I doubt it's one which is generally well supported by local financial institutions or investors. And I suspect it's the smart ambitious locals that could generate the highest returns on that support if they got it. Ultimately the resulting business models may look different - fewer exit options than SV but also drastically lower medium-term funding requirements and untapped regional markets.

Then again, reforming the business environment in many developing countries to make it an attractive destination for modest-sized equity investments in SMEs might prove a even bigger challenge than reforming US immigration...

>Zidisha is purely an online service, without local loan officers, and our understanding is that applications of profit-sharing models to microfinance rely on extensive personal monitoring of the funded businesses.

Based on this, I would think that giving entrepreneurs money isn't the only way to help them become successful. Most successful startups in the US(especially SV) rely on much more than just money to be successful. Those "old boy" networks, mentors, etc. all play a big role in building successful companies. So why not give stranded African entrepreneurs the same opportunity?

I'd be more than happy to make out a profit-sharing loan and nurture an entrepreneur who hasn't had the luxury to get an advanced education in some field.

Perhaps money isn't all they need...