Possibly fake Kiva loans

Looks to me like there are just two women with children in Sierra Leone that run little shops that sell similar items.<p>I&#x27;m sure Kiva has several templates that they use to post loans - you don&#x27;t think they write each one by hand, do you?

Search Query &quot;loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks, and soap to expand her business&quot;<p>1. Helping Through Kiva - Surigao Internet Marketing www.surigaointernetmarketing.com&#x2F;...&#x2F;helping-through-kiva?view...id...‎ Posseh requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks, and soap to expand her business. She hopes that the extra income from this loan will allow her to ...<p>2. Helping Through Kiva - Surigao Internet Marketing www.surigaointernetmarketing.com&#x2F;...&#x2F;helping-through-kiva?view...id...‎ Kadie requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks, and soap to expand her business for resale. She hopes that the extra income from this loan will ...<p>3. Adama - EmmausChurches.org www.emmauschurches.org&#x2F;index.php?option=com_jfmicro...‎ Adama requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks and soap to expand her business. She hopes that the extra income from this loan will allow her to ...<p>4. Wakibi - Microkrediet aan Mbalu, Sierra Leone www.wakibi.nl&#x2F;2-657214&#x2F;‎ Translate this page Jan 14, 2014 - Mbalu requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks and soap to expand her business. She hopes that the extra income from this loan ...<p>5. &lt;社会貢献&gt; シエラレオネ共和国で一般商店をしている起業家 Hawaさん kivajapan.org&#x2F;entrepreneurs&#x2F;?k_guid=654331‎ Translate this page Hawa requires a loan in order to purchase cigarettes, drinks and soap to expand her business. She hopes that the extra income from this loan will allow her to ...<p>looks like a template

An update from Kiva: their field partners, who may not have english as a first language, use templates and fill in the blanks. So nothing to be alarmed from.<p>The full response:<p>&quot;Hi Juan,<p>Thanks so much for your email and writing in about these two loan profiles.<p>I took a look, and while the stores do look similar, and the language is also similar, these are two distinct borrowers.<p>As you may know, the loan descriptions you see on Kiva&#x27;s website are written by our Field Partners. To help the staff at our partners, who may not have English as a first language, our team will sometimes provide loan description templates. These templates help make it easier for our Field Partners to draft loan descriptions by allowing them to fill in different facts about the borrower, such as number of children, marital status, etc. Because some of our partners have these templates, you may see similarities in the style of different loan descriptions from the same Field Partner. This may be why you see loans with similar verbiage when browsing the Lend page of our website.<p>While these similarities shouldn&#x27;t be a cause of alarm, you may be interested to know that Kiva does use a process called borrower verification to to verify the accuracy of the information included in the borrower profiles posted on the Kiva website.<p>Hope this provides some helpful context, and if you have any other questions, let me know!&quot;

Lets not forget that Kiva profiles are there purely as a way to entice the individual to lend. The money just goes in aggregate to the local lending org. The profile you see is mostly a gimmick.

I don&#x27;t see anything bad about that The text looks the same but those seem to be very different people and shops. The Kiva personnel look for certain types of people to lend money to in order to do economic development and sometimes copy and pasting a bit of text best explains to us from afar what they&#x27;re going to do with the money.<p>You&#x27;d be surprised how many people need to specifically purchase &quot;cigarettes, drinks, and soap&quot; to expand their business.

Could it not just be that there are a lot of people in similar situations getting loans through Kiva and to save time a template is used for the loan description?

Who writes the profiles? Is it possible that a field partner of Kiva writes the profiles? That might explain the similarity. They might well i) use a template to create the text, and ii) seek out loan candidates who match a very specific set of criteria. That might explain the similarities.

According to those pages, they want more than an average year of income for a person in that area, to buy inventory. Isn&#x27;t that too much inventory to buy all at once?<p>And yeah it looks like there was a shared template for both of these.