Funded

Total loan: $900

Beatrice's Group

Vihiga, Kenya / Health

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A loan helped a member to provide communities with free access to chlorine to treat their drinking water.

Beatrice's Group's story

Beatrice is 32 years old, has 4 children, and lives in Gamgoi village in Vihiga, Kenya. Gamgoi village does not have a piped water supply, so the community collects their water from a river, stream, or other flowing water source. This water is easily contaminated with bacteria that can cause diarrhea and other water-borne diseases, meaning that Beatrice and her family may fall sick and become unable to work or attend school.

Beatrice works as a subsistence/peasant farmer, but has also volunteered her time to be the promoter for a new chlorine dispenser program that enables her community to drink safe water and stay healthy. Beatrice and other promoters in her community (including Janet and Phanike) need a loan to cover the costs of installing and maintaining chlorine dispensers at the water sources in the area. Beatrice will encourage the community to treat their water with the dispenser, and refill the dispenser with chlorine as needed. Beatrice wants to be a promoter because she is loved by community, and she believes that the dispenser will save lives.

The Kiva loan will be repaid by Evidence Action (www.evidenceaction.org) on behalf of the community, through the sale of carbon credits. Using the chlorine dispenser generates carbon credits by avoiding the need to boil water to make it safe to drink. The sale of carbon credits, to organizations and individuals wanting to reduce their carbon footprint, will be used to repay Kiva lenders and also to make sure that Beatrice’s community can have access to safe water now and in the future.

In this group: Beatrice, Janet, Phanike

More about this loan

About Evidence Action:

This loan is part of Evidence Action?s Dispensers for Safe Water program, providing rural communities with access to safe drinking water by installing chlorine dispensers where people collect water. The dispensers enable community members to treat their water with chlorine to make it safe to drink.

Kiva loans are used to finance the installation, maintenance and refilling of chlorine dispensers. Evidence Action provides dispensers as in-kind loans to communities, represented on Kiva by dispenser ?promoters,? who will help educate their neighbors about the equipment?s use and benefits, and refill the dispenser with chlorine.

Instead of these loans being repaid by community members, Kiva lenders are reimbursed by the sale of carbon credits. These carbon credits are generated when households use chlorine dispensers to treat their water, because they no longer have to boil it over wood-burning fires that release harmful greenhouse gases. This change in behavior is monetized through the sale of carbon credits on the voluntary carbon market.

Here?s how it works:

1) Kiva borrowers grant the rights to carbon credits they generate to Evidence Action. 2) Evidence Action works with an organization called Impact Carbon to monitor, quantify and verify carbon credits, which can then be sold to individuals and organizations looking to reduce their carbon footprint. 3) Revenue earned from this sale is used to maintain dispensers and repay Kiva lenders.

This is the first time Kiva is financing loans that are repaid with carbon credit revenues. By supporting this loan, you?re joining an exciting experiment in using credit to fund carbon-reducing water projects. This also means that these loans may carry a significantly higher level of risk than typical Kiva loans.

To learn more about this model, read our blog post "A new way of thinking: Carbon as currency."

This Kiva loan will be used to provide borrowers with needed goods or services, as opposed to cash or financial credit.