Jessica Jackley came to give a talk in a class last Friday. It's hard to believe that a young lady who looks just like my peer has done something so impressive - Kiva has facilitated over $100 million microloans since its founding four years ago. Hearing her story is further inspiring. She started so small, just by writing stories of entrepreneurs in developing worlds who need some small amounts of lending to start their businesses, and sending those stories back to friends and sharing them on a website. It all started there. The human one-to-one touch is what really made Kiva special. Traditional lending syndicates multiple borrowers, and in doing so, disconnects the human touch between the lenders and the borrowers. Kiva allows one to build a direct connection with the person he/she is helping and it's not charity - the lender only gives up a small amount of interest income.
I've always kept a list of interesting ideas, and one of them I spent some time on last summer was to build a "Kiva for Education" - allowing individuals to lend small amounts of money to help more people get access to education. The assumption is that education is the best investment you can make and potentially yields high ROI. Investing in a person and empowering that person to take on a more productive life should yield a positive outcome. However, education lending itself has several challenges: (1) education is a longer-term investment, especially if you want to invest in the younger children; (2) the field infrastructure is much less available than the wide network of MFI partners which help make Kiva scale so fast.
I'm still interested in that idea and hope to revisit at some point in the future.
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