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Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Kiva - an amazing success

Most of us involved in the tech start-up world will have noticed Kiva getting publicised quite widely. See the rhs of this blog for example. What is not that widely understood is just how Kiva works and how powerful it is. The well constructed video below tells the story.Kiva Microfunds


A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan from Kieran Ball on Vimeo.


Some of the numbers speak for themselves: Kiva is only 39 months old. It has raised loans totalling $55,521,085 for low-income entrepreneurs in the developing world. Its repayment rate todate is 97% It has funded 125,496 entrepreneurs to date. There are over 400,000 Kiva users from 156 countries.

Recently,
Wonga, unsecured small loans company - featured in a previous post - became a backer of Kiva.
Wonga is lending £1 interest-free, via Kiva, for every Wonga loan they process. To date Wonga has lent $14,475.

Many corporates are setting up similar schemes. What a great illustration of how the web enables previously impossible ideas!



1 comment:

  1. Anonymous5:47 pm

    Everyone at Wonga loves working with Kiva and we get a great deal of satisfaction from choosing who to help and then watching their progress. You can find out more about our partnership here - http://www.wonga.com/kiva/ - and even join our lending team here - http://www.kiva.org/team/wonga. You don't have to lend to join our team and we welcome 'passive' support as it were. The more the merrier!

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