Kiva conducts regular, ongoing monitoring of all Lending Partners, but only posts status updates here in response to relevant, major changes at the partner.

Status update — May 17, 2018

Kiva and Nuru International have agreed to end their partnership, as the organization is no longer in need of Kiva funding. Nuru International has fully paid its outstanding balance to Kiva, and these funds have been distributed to lenders. Kiva thanks Nuru International for its partnership.

Partner Description:

Nuru International (Nuru) is a non-profit organization committed to providing underserved farmers living in remote, rural areas of the developing world with the means to overcome the economic challenges facing their families and communities.

Partnering with farmers from the West Kuria district of Kenya, Nuru is currently piloting The Nuru Model, an innovative community development program that is integrated, self-sustaining, and self-scaling. This model has the potential to impact remote, rural, agrarian communities of entire countries -- beginning with Kenya and Ethiopia -- and currently addresses four key areas of need: (1) Food shortages, (2) Inability to cope with economic shocks, (3) Preventable disease and death, (4) Limited or no access to quality education for children.

In many regions across Sub-Saharan Africa, the months prior to seasonal harvests are difficult for agricultural communities: faced with diminished food supplies, families often suffer from deficient nutritional and caloric intake. Nuru Kenya’s Agriculture Program addresses episodic hunger by helping small-scale farmers to increase their crop yields, ensuring that they have enough food to eat and surplus to sell for income.

The program’s primary product is the Agricultural Input Loan. Rather than giving farmers cash, Nuru’s provides them with an in-kind loan consisting of high quality seed, DAP and CAN fertilizers, and extension services to provide supervision and technical advice during the growing season. Nuru farmers repay the loan at the end of harvest.

Since issuing its first agricultural input loan in 2009, the Agriculture Program has disbursed 15,213 loans to farmers in Kenya. The final report for the 2012 long rains harvest celebrated that 96.8% of Nuru members repaid their loan and experienced an average 123% increase in crop yield from the previous year.

The World Bank classifies Nuru’s clients as “extremely poor” as they live on less than $1.25 a day. However, Nuru promotes the idea that “extreme poverty” is more than just a lack of financial resources, defining it instead as “the lack of opportunity to make meaningful choices to attain basic human rights.” The organization proposes that by changing our vision of the problem, we can begin to ask new questions, seek new answers and arrive at new solutions.

In this way, through training, mentorship, and capacity building, Nuru seeks to empower individuals, equip them to make their own choices for their families and restore agency within entire communities to ensure that extreme poverty is eradicated in remote, rural areas—forever.



A unique lending approach:

Nuru provides borrowers with farm input loans during the planting season ahead of the long rains with the expectation that farmers will be able to repay them after the harvest. As all inputs are distributed at a single period during the year, before repayments have been completed, scaling the Agricultural Input program is creating cash flow challenges for the organization.

As the organization attempts to scale its operations to reach additional farmers -- Nuru intends to reach over 11,000 farmers in Kenya and 1,700 farmers in Ethiopia by 2016 -- funding from Kiva lenders will help cover this gap, allowing the program to continue reaching an increasing number of farmers every year.

The Agricultural Input loan is proven to more than double a farmer’s maize yield, increasing household food security, generating income and ultimately enabling farmers to lift themselves and their families out of extreme poverty.

Images courtesy of Nuru International