KivaSort

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ID Name Portfolio Yield Profitability Currency Exchange Loss Rate Total Amount Raised Loans Posted Delinquency Rate Default Rate Rating Average Loan Size Percent Per Capita Income Loans At Risk Rate Status Start Date Country URL

What is it?

A table of Kiva's field partners (the microfinance organizations which administer loans made possible by Kiva) which may be sorted and filtered.

Motivation

I created KivaSort to complement an essay I wrote called Some thoughts on Kiva's interest rates.

Most of Kiva's field partners collect interest on the loans they disburse. The rates of interest vary, but they are sometimes very high despite the fact that much of the risk and cost is offloaded to Kiva and Kiva's generous users. Identifying field partners with high (or low) interest would be easiest if they could all be sorted by their "Portfolio Yield" (average interest rates) and "Profitability" (return on assets) metrics. The higher those rates, the higher the interest will tend to be on loans from those lenders. Providing the ability to sort the list of Kiva's field partners in such a way is the main motivating force behind the creation of KivaSort.

Kiva provides a table of field partners on their web site, but it has limited sorting options (it cannot be sorted by portfolio yield, for example). Kiva does provide nice APIs for their various services, which KivaSort uses.

Further reading

See also

Hints on Using KivaSort

By default, KivaSort lists field partners ordered primarily by "Portfolio Yield" so that field partners with low interest rates will be near the top. But note that expensive loans do not necessarily indicate usurious loans (at least not more usurious than other lenders); some locations have legitimately high costs associated with administering loans due to such factors as social instability, inflation, and lack of infrastructure. In that respect, a high "Profitability" metric may be the best way to identify highly exploitative lenders — although a consistently negative "Profitability" may indicate a non-sustainable field partner.

Hopefully the various controls for filtering, sorting, and exporting the table data are self-explanatory. Here are a few tips:

Open Source

The KivaSort web site is completely open source. If you'd like to view or contribute to the project, please take a look at the public git repository:

Who?

KivaSort.americancynic.net and the KivaSort JQuery plugin were created and are maintained by chris burkhardt <[email protected]>.

I write small, Free software and radical social commentary. If you found KivaSort helpful, please consider making a small contribution to further my work on this and similar projects.