"Refunded": What does this term mean?

[Guest]

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[Marcia]

As I have been surfing the Kiva site as a relative Kiva newbie, I have seen some peoples' loans have been paid back, some are in the process of repayment, and some are listed as "Refunded".  What does this term mean? I didn't see it explained on the Kiva website anywhere. 

[Diane R]

Hi Marcia, and welcome!

There have been several instances, either before or after the disbursal of funds to the borrowers, where Kiva has elected to no longer support the MFI, either because of problems at that organization itself (WITEP in Uganda) or problems with local instability (ACODE Finance in Chad).  Upon return of this money to lenders, the loan is marked REFUNDED.

There were also a number of loans recently which were refunded by Prisma in Nicaragua, because they'd discovered that some(/all?) of the loans posted that month by their local office were "vaporware" (that is, they were made up).  There was some discussion here that these should have been listed as REFUNDED, but the director of Prisma elected to get the money back to the lenders ASAP and marked them all "REPAID".  (Since they were for nonexistent borrowers in the first place, it could be argued either way.)

--Diane.

[RichardF]

Hey there Marcia!

When you go to any Field Partner page and put your cursor over any of the statistics titles, the cursor gets a question mark next to it.  If you click the title, you get a definition for it.  Here's one for refunds...

17. Refund Rate:

Percentage of Total Loans that have been refunded due to an error. Errors vary from the unintentional (e.g. Field Partner accidentally uploaded a duplicate Entrepreneur profile which received funding and recognized it later) to more serious issues (e.g. a Kiva audit discovered that loan funds were used inappropriately). In the latter case, Kiva will attempt to refund lenders with any funds recovered. In all cases, information about why the refund was issued is published on each business listing page.