The innovative peer-to-peer microlending site Kiva.org received a new round of PR today when Nicholas Kristof featured the site in his New York Times column.  Check out an excerpt at the NB Newsroom or Times Select for the full column (subscription required).  Readers have also been chiming in over at Kristof's blog on the Times site.

In light of this story, I would like to point readers to a two-part interview (Part 1; Part 2) that our own Sara Standish did with Kiva founder Matt Flannery and CEO Premal Shah last year.  There are MP3 files available as well as transcripts.  Woth a listen and/or a read.  Here's a quick excerpt:

NB: How do you weigh in on the current microfinance debates?  And what is Kiva’s role in the greater micro credit community?
Matt Flannery: I just want to contribute to the field.  I want every MFI that works with Kiva to come out in a better place than where they started, whether it’s an NGO, a development organization or an actual bank.  If they work with Kiva I want to help them own it.  I hope that the money we provide furthers them along the path to being self sustainable and that is my personal view on where the industry is going for microfinance.
Premal Shah: What is the role of subsidization?  There are 10,000 MFIs.  Should there be industry Darwinism or should more MFIs proliferate because only 10% of the world’s poor have access to financial services?  There are these raging debates between practitioners and pundits and my experience through Kiva (and prior to Kiva) has been to try and understand the things that Kiva does that are indisputably good and I think that there are a couple of them. 

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The Next 4 Billion includes a whole chapter on a topic for which we were unable to present a single, real number from our analysis of household surveys. Not surprisingly, the chapter is short. So, why did we include it, if we couldn’t report any numbers? And why do we recommend it to you?

Well, as these pages have shown numerous times, we believe that financial services are a breakout sector - for the BOP, for business, and for the development community. For the BOP, access to financial services means new jobs and income; the creation of formal identity (perhaps for the first time); the reduction of physical risk (it’s dangerous to carry cash on your person, or store it in your home, in many parts of the world); the economic empowerment of women, perhaps the single most critical element of development; among other positive impacts.

But wait, there's more! Special for the readers of NextBillion, something you won’t find in the chapter (we ran out of time and space….) The Inter-American Development Bank created for us a set of two graphics that represent why businesses need to look at the BOP. Here they are:

What these maps are saying, to me at least, is that there is a huge, unmet need waiting for smart businesses to serve. A lot of money is going places where there are no financial institutions. Were these not poor people, you can bet that this market opportunity would have been acted upon long before.

For business, the increasing understanding that the poor need more than microcredit opens their eyes to what I believe is likely a trillion dollar market at a minimum. Why a trillion? Just the tracked country-to-country remittances are approaching $350 billion; most informed observers are confident that this underestimates the between-countries market by as much as 50%, which gets us around half a trillion.

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