Issue date: 10/11/07 Section: Campus News

Media Credit: Courtesy of Max Schoening This summer, five Brown students and an alum traveled to Kenya to document the impact of microfinance on the lives of the loans' beneficiaries.

After school let out last spring, five students and an alum traveled to western Kenya for four weeks to gather footage for several films on how microfinance is changing the lives of entrepreneurs in developing countries. Stephen Salisbury '09, Max Schoening '09, Justine McGowan '08, Tihtina Zenebe Gebre '09, Colin Chazen '09 and Ryan Heath '05 went to Africa in cooperation with Kiva, a microfinancing organization that allows individuals to lend small sums of money to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world through the company's Web site. The idea for the trip came from Brown's chapter of Students of the World, a national organization that sends teams of college students to developing countries to document progress.

The students are still in the process of editing their film footage, but they hope to ultimately produce two promotional films for Kiva documenting success stories of microfinance in Kenya, as well as another microfinance film that will present this story to the Brown community.

The students originally traveled to Africa simply to film for their documentary, but they ended up working for Kiva as well. McGowan, Schoening and Heath were located in rural Kenya, while Gebre, Chazen and Salisbury were located in Kisumu, the third-largest city in Kenya. In each group of three, two students worked as field journalists, traveling to interview entrepreneurs in Kenya who had received loans through Kiva. The third person documented stories of the interviewed entrepreneurs by maintaining online profiles of them. "It's a totally different experience to actually get on the ground. The people in the country were very interested in bettering their country … (which) was really inspiring," said Heath, who served as a field journalist.

Since microfinance is still being introduced to Kenyans, changes in the country are not monumental just yet, Schoening said. Still, based on his observations, he said microfinance has been able to change the lives of the limited number of entrepreneurs who have received loans. For example, Schoening described a particularly memorable female entrepreneur whose husband, who had four other wives, had ceased to take care of her and her children. Through the loans, she started three businesses, which helped her begin to provide for her children. One business centered around selling produce, and another involved scrap metal.

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