When it comes to starting a business, Kiva lender Erica knows firsthand how hard it can be for women to find the necessary capital.
The entrepreneur is the co-founder and director of Salaam Space, a yoga and wellness center in the peaceful seaside village of Qantab just outside Muscat, the capital city of Oman. Before she could open its doors, however, she faced challenges because of her gender.
“I found it incredibly difficult to raise funding because I was a woman,” recalls Erica, describing the frustration at being stymied even though she had a sound business plan and strong social connections.
“It inspired me to invest in women around the world who might be facing similar problems, albeit on a different scale.”
“I was once in a situation where I wanted to start a business and I had to put myself out there for financing from people I didn't know. It's just the same thing, right? We all need a hand sometimes.”
Her serene studio now offers a full schedule of classes, workshops, and private retreats, catering to tourists from Europe as well as other Middle Eastern countries.
“Most come from Germany, Italy, and France, and many also from the GCC,” she says, referring to the Cooperation Council for Arab States of the Gulf, an economic and political alliance of six Middle Eastern countries, including Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
“There's a big push across the GCC for wellness, particularly what will help with mental health. They don't necessarily have the infrastructure to be able to talk openly about mental health issues, so things like yoga are very popular.”
Many of Salaam Space’s events are women-only to respect cultural codes of modesty, though Erica finds Oman’s “melting pot” of Arab, African, Balochistani, and other global influences makes for a relatively peaceful coexistence for all.
“In a region where you often hear about conflict, there is a quiet acceptance here,” she muses. “Though there is still a way to go to achieve gender equality.”
A global perspective
“It inspired me to invest in women around the world who might be facing similar problems, albeit on a different scale.”
Born to a British architect father and a Zambian fashion designer mother, Erica grew up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and attended boarding school in the United Kingdom. Her cosmopolitan upbringing informed an expansive view of the world and its citizens, a unifying perspective that was amplified even further once she became a mother.
“I traveled a lot as a child and while I was having my daughter,” says Erica, who now has three children, ages 7, 9, and 11.
“As I moved through the world, I was suddenly seeing people doing the exact same thing that I was doing, which was trying to get through the day keeping your child relatively safe and happy.”
This sense of camaraderie with women, especially ones raising children, guides her lending choices on Kiva, though she admits she was a bit skeptical about the microfinance industry at first.
As profits from her business began to roll in, Erica wanted to help other female entrepreneurs. She’d read about Kiva in the bestselling book Half the Sky about tapping into the potential of women in developing countries to improve economic progress, but she was concerned about over-indebtedness and other pitfalls of microlending.
“I looked it up on the Internet, and then I spoke to a friend of mine that I went to boarding school who operates out of Africa, and she was like, ‘Look, microfinance is tricky, but these guys seem to know what they're doing’.” She decided to sign up for Kiva, citing the high scrutiny and due diligence process of its Lending Partners as the selling point.
Read more: Client protection and preventing over-indebtedness in microfinance
Helping women in the hardest places
With a focus on lending exclusively to women, she began looking for borrowers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a part of the world where she knew political upheaval and systematic sexual violence make it even harder for female entrepreneurs to realize their creative visions.
“One of my first loans was to a Congolese woman who wanted to buy motorcycles to rent out as a business,” she remembers.
“I was like, ‘damn, that is a really good idea!’”
Erica’s affinity for borrowers in the DRC has much to do with the country’s proximity to Zambia, where she visits her mother’s family regularly. While the two African nations may both lie in the middle of the continent, the difference in the quality of life is extreme.
“I was actually in the Congo recently, and Congolese ladies and mothers have far less familial stability than Zambian women, far less safety,” she notes.
“We still have enormous poverty problems, of course, but we face nowhere near the extent of violence that people face in the Congo on a regular basis.”
She has since made loans to women in more than a dozen countries, including places where she’s never been.
“Lending on Kiva has made me consider parts of the world unrelated to my original intentions,” she says of her shift in “looking a bit further afield” for innovative business ideas that catch her eye.
“I’ve done a few loans in South America on the basis of seeing, ‘Oh, this is a mother,’ and then when I look at what they're doing it's like ‘Oh, that's quite an interesting project!’”
The joys of the re-lending cycle
Erica says she enjoys getting notifications when borrowers make repayments, and it makes her even more excited to lend the money out again: “I love to see it recycled, it just goes around and goes on.”
As she expands her business ventures to other countries—she is currently developing a wellness hotel in Zambia—she plans to continue to filter her Kiva dashboard to seek out mothers with entrepreneurial aspirations all over the world.
“What hasn't changed is that I don't see myself at all separately from the women who are applying for loans,” she assures.
“I was once in a situation where I wanted to start a business and I had to put myself out there for financing from people I didn't know. It's just the same thing, right? We all need a hand sometimes.”
