The Best Collections Officer Is the Next Borrower in Line

A few months ago Ronnie Mdawida and I started running small Bitcoin microloan experiments in our two circular economies — Kibera and Kampala. Here’s what we’re starting to learn, and what Geyser is now exploring with us.

A few weeks ago, Ronnie and I sat on a call with Michele and Stelios — Geyser’s co-founders — to compare notes on something we had been quietly testing in our two communities for the past few months.

Ronnie has been running a small microlending pilot in Kibera through Afribit Kibera.
I have been running one in Kampala through Bitcoin Kampala.

Different communities. Different structures. Different signals so far.

His has been holding.

Mine has been working — but in a way that won’t scale.

What we are seeing in the gap between the two is the most useful early lesson either of us has from these pilots. This piece is that lesson, framed as a hypothesis we are still testing.

The Fiat Baseline We Are Competing With

A boda boda rider in Kibera can buy a motorbike for about $1,300 in cash.

If he buys the same bike through the local shylock system, it costs him $3,000 by the time the loan is paid.

That spread — more than the price of the bike itself — is value being extracted from a community that already has very little to lose.

Multiply it by every rider. Every vendor. Every machine purchase across East Africa.

That is the cost of having no other option.

That is the bet Ronnie and I have been testing, in sats.

Two Pilots, Two Approaches

Kibera. Ronnie groups merchants into chamas of five — a Kenyan cooperative format people already know. Loan sizes typically range from around 50K to 400K sats. In the round Ronnie ran, three of the five received loans first. The remaining two — and the three borrowers themselves — keep each other in check. The social pressure runs in every direction inside a chama, not just from one watching neighbour. The merchants choose the repayment cadence: a few thousand sats a week, paid into a shared pool.

Alongside the principal, the borrowers contribute what would normally be the interest — not to a lender, but to a community fund the chama nominates. In Kibera, that fund is education. It is dedicated to the long-term learning of the same borrowers paying into it. The interest never leaves the circle. It loops back to fund the people paying it.

Kampala. I put six businesses in a room. They voted on which two would receive the first loan. Two won. We disbursed direct. No interest. The understanding was: pay it back over seven months and the fund rotates to the next business.

I ran collections myself.

That has been the constraint.

What We’re Seeing So Far

Ronnie’s chamas have been holding.

Not perfectly, not for long, not at scale. Repayment is small, weekly, and quiet. But the structure carries itself. The fund is moving on its own pace.

Mine, on paper, has also been paid back.

But every week I am the one chasing. When I travel, repayment slows. When other obligations pile up, repayment slows. And the businesses next in line — the ones who voted but have not yet received — have no role in keeping the first two accountable.

They are waiting for me.

The Working Hypothesis

The best collections officer is the next borrower in line.

If you are the circular economy leader and you are the one chasing repayments, you have built a system that depends entirely on your time and goodwill.

That is not a system.

That is a favor.

The people best positioned to keep a borrower accountable are the people who want the money next. They live in the same neighborhood. They know where the borrower works. They know whether a missed payment is a real emergency or an excuse. And every sat that comes back into the pool brings them one step closer to their own turn.

This is what we keep coming back to when we compare notes.

It is still a hypothesis. A few months of small numbers behind it, not years. But it is the variable we are watching most closely as we run the next round.

A Loan Is Only Half of What an Entrepreneur Needs

Money on its own is not enough.

A boda rider without a license is one police stop away from losing the bike and the loan.
A vendor without registration is one crackdown away from losing the stall and the loan.
A new business without legal incorporation cannot sign a contract, cannot open an account, cannot get on a delivery roster.

So we have been testing the loan as the spine of a small wrap-around package:

• Compliance. Driving schools, licenses, insurance, registration — paid for inside the loan, before the asset.
• Legal. Reusing the same lawyer to incorporate the next business, paid from the loan envelope.
• Authority interface. A police contact, a local-government contact, somebody who already knows what the circular economy is doing.
• Clients. When Afribit Kibera or Bitcoin Kampala can plug compliant riders into delivery contracts that come through our networks, we are not just lending. We are routing demand.

The loan is the spine. The accelerator around it is what we are testing as the thing that keeps the borrower alive long enough to pay it back.

Humanizing Repayment

The other thing we are testing is what to do when the borrower defaults.

The default playbook — seize the asset — feels like the wrong move for a bitcoin circular economy.

You do not recover much.
You destroy the relationship.
You scare off everyone watching.

The humanized version we are trying: do not pluck the bike. Find an errand.

A delivery. A small job. A referral.

Paid directly, in sats. Fuel covered. The balance routed against the loan.

Often the problem is not ability to pay. It is a psychological block, a bad week, a family emergency. Give the borrower a way to work through it without losing their tools, and so far they have come back.

What Geyser and the Hubs Are Exploring Together

Geyser is exploring microlending. Not launching it. Not committed to one model. Exploring.

And they are doing it the right way — in conversation with the hubs that have been quietly trying this for themselves, instead of arriving with a product and looking for users.

On our most recent call, Michele and Stelios agreed to try a small pilot with us: one or two micro-loans, run end-to-end through Geyser, to see exactly where the rails hold and where they bend.

The shape we have been discussing looks something like this:

• Capital comes from the global bitcoin community through Geyser. Lenders take 0% interest. Their return is impact.
• The circular economy hub is the on-the-ground lender. We vet. We structure. We collect. We wrap the loan with the accelerator. The interest covers our work.
• The borrower’s group keeps the borrower accountable. Not us. We do not want to scale by chasing repayments. We want to scale by designing groups that chase each other.
• Eventually the hub registers as a microfinance institution — the legal vehicle that lets capital flow without tripping over local financial regulation, including Kenya’s incoming VASP bill.

Nothing here is settled. The repayment rail back to the lender does not fully exist yet. The legal layer is open. The credit-score primitive is open. We are figuring all of it out as we go.

What we do agree on is the layering.

Lenders trust Geyser.
Geyser trusts the hubs.
The hubs trust the chamas.
The chamas trust the borrowers.

Each layer earns its trust on evidence and track record. Including pilots like ours, written up plainly. Including the parts that did not work.

What Comes Next

A small pilot in Kibera. One or two first borrowers, around 50K sats each. Run end-to-end through Geyser so we can see exactly where the flow breaks.

In Kampala I am restructuring the existing borrowers into next-beneficiary groups and watching what changes.

We will keep sharing what we find — the wins and the misses — because the only way trust like this gets built is in public.

If you want a model like this to exist, the most useful thing you can do right now is not to send us a grant. It is to ask, of any African project you back: what would it take for this money to come back?

The answer to that question is the design we are trying to build with Michele and Stelios at Geyser.

We will tell you whether it works.

* * *

A few months in. A handful of borrowers. Not a model yet — but maybe the start of one.

Contact: brindon@gorilla-sats.com | brindonmwiine.com