The odds of getting repaid are very good. Only about 3.5% of loans default, and even then the chances are good you'll still get most of your money back. But with over 450,000 lenders there are bound to be some unlucky people. The unluckiest lender had all of her 9 loans default. She also had 11 refunded loans. Usually refunded loans aren't included in Kiva's numbers or in their API, but I noticed them on her lender page. At least those 9 loans repaid a significant fraction of the loan amount, so she probably got about 86% of her money back.
Here's a list of the number of lenders with 100% defaulted loans:
| # Loans | # Lenders |
| 9 | 1 |
| 6 | 1 |
| 5 | 3 |
| 4 | 12 |
| 3 | 30 |
| 2 | 264 |
| 1 | 4492 |
I like to tell people how awesome Kiva is, but these people probably tell their friends that Kiva is a huge failure. If I'm going to loan more money anyway, I might as well try to help two unlucky people at one time. I just sent a message to the unluckiest lender offering to send her a gift certificate to make a new loan; hopefully I can help change a statistic instead of just calculating it.
