Thursday, May 28, 2009

KF8 Training Complete & Kiva Fellows Application Fixed

The next class of Kiva Fellows has finished training at Kiva headquarters and will soon be heading into the field. Congratulations to the 27 trainees that officially became Kiva Fellows last week. They enthusiastically handled five full days of powerpoint presentations, demos, and discussions.

Some highlights from training included the Kiva Social, a cable car ride through San Francisco, the Go-Game fundraiser, and watching funny welcome videos from two KF7's.

The KF8 fellows will be placed in 19 countries throughout the world. This class will be strengthening the relationship between their host MFI and Kiva and several will be working with brand new Kiva field partners.



KF8 Trainees: Velizara, Merrick, Jenny, Julia, Cissy, Laura, Courtney, Jaclyn, Hanh, Suzy, Nilima, Susan, Polly, Nancy, Sloane, Alison, Shereef, Rob, Andrew, Athan, Joel, Lee, Dave, Cameron, Tamara, and Michael (Zev not pictured).

Kiva Fellows Application:

KF9 applicants recently had trouble submitting their application via our web application. We discovered that a software bug broke the application between May 23rd and May 27th. The Kiva Fellows Program did not receive your application if you applied during that timeframe. We apologize for the inconvenience, but please resubmit your application soon. The application deadline for KF9 is Monday June 1st (although we accept applications on a rolling basis).

Successful Kiva Fellows tend to have significant overseas experience, background in economics/finance/consulting, enthusiasm for Kiva, and fluency or advanced communication ability in the language spoken in the country placement. The languages that we are looking for include: Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic, Bahasa Indonesian, Tagalog or Cebuano, Mongolian, Urdu, Portuguese, Swahili, Khmer, Vietnamese, Nepali, Bulgarian, and Turkish. For the KF9 class, the Kiva Fellows Program is particularly interested in applicants with specific technical skills who can build tools to benefit our field partners.

We are excited to see the great work that KF8 will provide to Kiva and their host MFI and we are already looking forward to bringing on the next class of fellows in KF9.