The International Bank of Bob

The International Bank of Bob: Connecting Our Worlds One $25 Kiva Loan at a Time is a 2013 travel memoir by American author and comic Bob Harris. The book follows Harris’s decision to become involved in microfinance, lending money to entrepreneurs and families in the developing world. Having invested $20,000 through the microfinance organization Kiva, Harris travels the globe to meet the people whose ambitions he has helped to fund. Reviewers praised the book for combining easy-to-read and amusing narrative content with a thoroughly researched account of the state of microfinance: “In an engaging, fully transparent, upbeat narrative, with chockablock footnotes and resources, Harris presents the MFI case very persuasively” (Kirkus Reviews).

The book opens in 2008. Working as a freelance journalist, Harris has landed a dream assignment, reviewing the world’s most luxurious hotels for Forbes Traveler. In high-end hotels from Dubai to Singapore, Harris becomes increasingly uneasy with the opulence on display. He drinks “The World’s Most Expensive Cocktail” ($7,438—it comes in a gold tumbler), and $75 coffee made with beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a civet. He stays in a $1,500 room with a vending machine that dispenses gold bars.

Harris’s unease solidifies into horror in Abu Dhabi, where he discovers that his $3 billion hotel was built by migrant laborers working in life-threatening heat for less than $8 a day.



For the rest of the trip, Harris contemplates the “birth lottery” which has enabled him to enjoy lifelong prosperity and comfort while others are forced to survive on next to nothing. He feels determined to make a difference, but he doesn’t know how. At first, he doubts there is anything one person can do which will make a real impact.

As he investigates the various charities and organizations working in the developing world, Harris hears a talk by Premal Shah, the president of microfinance organization Kiva. Excited by the idea of microfinance, Harris decides to lend the $20,000 he has been paid for his Forbes article through Kiva. He makes more than five thousand loans, with an average size of just $25.

Harris explains how Kiva works. A non-profit based in San Francisco, Kiva enables individual donors to lend a minimum of $25 at a time to entrepreneurs in the developing world, from farmers and shopkeepers to artisans and traders. Harris finds himself hooked by the ability to see pictures of the people he is helping and read their stories.



As his involvement with Kiva deepens, Harris begins learning more about microfinance. He describes its development by Bangladeshi Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and his microfinance institution the Grameen Bank.

Harris finds that his money is repaid time after time: he keeps lending it, and soon he has loaned money to thousands of people. He decides that he wants to meet some of them to find out if his money has made an impact. He approaches Shah to propose a book, and Shah agrees, pointing out that many lenders wish they could meet the recipients of their loans.

The remainder of the book details Harris’s journey around the world. He meets loan recipients in countries from Bosnia to Morocco to Rwanda. The people he meets do not know that he is a lender, and Harris is constantly surprised by the generosity of the welcome he receives. He meets a couple who build furniture to fund their children’s education and a man who repairs bicycles. He meets a mother in Rwanda who has set up a grocery store. In Kenya, he meets several farmers who finance cows the way Westerners finance cars.



Along the way, Harris explains how Kiva works in the field, detailing the training of Kiva operatives and tracing the history of the organization’s growth through partner organizations. He also reveals some interesting statistics about which people tend to attract more loans.

Harris also endures some hazards, including terrifyingly rickety planes and a bout of dengue fever.

The tone of most of Harris’s adventures is light. He writes about an elderly woman in Peru who forces amorous petting on him, and a small Kenyan girl who is shocked at the sight of Harris because she has never seen a white man before.



Harris underlines an encounter with a Lebanese man who lost his crowd-funded restaurant in the war. In his broken English, the man explains that he is not bitter, because “The more you love, the more you win.”

These encounters remind Harris of his own parents, and bit-by-bit he unfurls his father’s story. Having grown up without electricity in rural Appalachia, his father was a factory worker at a GM plant in Ohio. Harris emphasizes that his father’s work ethic and ambition for his children is shared by everyone he meets, everywhere.

The book’s final chapter returns to the U.S., where Kiva has been lending to people in cities hit hard by the Recession. In Chicago, he meets a man running a restaurant with the help of a Kiva loan, and again he stresses that the struggles and dreams of Americans are the same as those of people everywhere.