Community Based Instruction with Kiva

Community-Based Unit of Instruction

Overview

Ever since my junior year of college after being enrolled in my first  International Agricultural course, I’ve had an interest in international agriculture. My interest further grew after spending four weeks in Malaysia for an AgEd 2 Malaysia Full-Bright scholarship program. One of the goals for the trip was to promote the integration of international studies in the secondary classroom. In class, I knew I would able to share my experiences, but I wanted my students to have their own experiences. After many hours of research, I came across an organization called Kiva. Kiva is an international nonprofit with a mission to expand financial access to help underserved communities to thrive. Kiva does this by crowdfunding loans, as little as $25 dollars, to borrowers. For my community-based unit of instruction, my virtual agribusiness class researched farmers across the globe with Kiva. By the end of the unit, as a class, we made ten $25 dollar loans to ten farmers in eight different countries!

Seeking Funding

To ensure that every student was able to make a loan to a farmer,  I contacted a representative at Kiva via email to see my options in seeking funding. To my surprise, Kiva was able to provide $25 dollars of vouchers to each of my students. What was needed on my part was the number of students, how I would use the vouchers, and to share our overall experiences with Kiva!

Classroom Instruction

Example of a students poster 

Before distributing loan codes to students they had to complete five assignments. The first assignment was for them to calculate their weekly expenses. An excel sheet was created for them to document their expenses for one week. After calculating their own expenses, we looked at family expenses around the world. In this assignment, they looked up two countries, one considered poor and the other rich and had to answer questions based off of the countries they selected. The overall goal for this assignment was to show that there is income inequality across the globe. This led to students questioning what factors that can lead countries into income inequality. Our third assignment identifies those factors as the 5 P’s of poverty: Place, Past, People, Peace, and Politics. With this assignment students looked at two countries and identify how these 5 P’s led the country to either be in poverty or not. The two countries we looked at were Chad and the United States. This led to the discussion on the poverty cycle and how that keep people in poverty unless an outside source comes in to help. For the fourth assignment, we identified an outside source that can help end poverty-Kiva. In this assignment, students identified Kiva and explained how they use microloans to help underserved communities. After receiving all needed information about Kiva and loans, students were tasked to research and identify a farmer they wanted to make a loan to. For their end of unit projects, students created a poster of their selected farmer and identified the 5 Ps of poverty that may have led them into their current situation to seek funding. After the posters were created, a bulletin board was made from the student's posters, to show how other people can get involved with Kiva and the impact the student had made.

Reflection

This community-based unit was a little different from the rest of my cohorts. Instead of impacting local communities, my students were able to impact communities around the world with their small donations. Kiva is a great way for teachers who struggle with bringing international agriculture to the classroom, instead of going somewhere, you are able to bring the world to your classroom. Through this process, students are able to recognize different cultures also develop empathy for people by seeing how little people can actually live on. For them to learn that the world is much bigger than their backyard is a huge concept, especially for those who don’t get to travel as much. By having students share their experience with the community this allows community members to become involved and to hopefully change their perspective of the world for the better.