Kiva: Crowdsourcing Philantrophy

November 28th, 2008 in News, by Head Honcho

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
- Lao Tzu

There are times in a person’ life when he just wants to reach out to someone in great need; to satiate the urge to lend a couple of hundred dollars so that person can pick himself up and start anew.

Now, imagine a portal where those people who are relatively well-off can help those less privileged financially to lift themselves out of poverty. Kiva.org provides such an avenue.
Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kiva takes crowdsourcing and collaboration to a whole new level. It revolutionizes how donors and lenders in the US and other developed countries connect with small entrepreneurs in developing countries. It gives a platform where an average Joe, for as low as $25, can have an opportunity to make a real difference to someone’s life.

How does Kiva work?

When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. And with a repayment rate of 100%, an on-time payment rate of +99%, you can be pretty sure that you’ll get your money back.

In other words, this is not exactly a dole out. It is giving people from Cambodia to Colombia a hand up, rather than a hand out.

And with more than $10 million lent and paid through Kiva, it just goes to show that the Kiva model of crowdsourcing philanthropy is a success.

Watch the clip to know more of what the people behind Kiva have to say.