Prof. Jessica Jackley visits Poly
University of Southern California Prof. Jessica Jackley visited Poly’s Upper School on November 18, 2019. Focusing on social justice through financial inclusion-based on entrepreneurship, Jackley co-founded Kiva, a person-to-person micro-lending website that has raised over one billion dollars in funding. In her book Clay Water Brick: Finding Inspiration from the Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least, Prof. Jackley inspires us with stories of the working poor from around the world.
As the world’s first online peer-to-peer micro-lending platform, Kiva supports people in starting or growing a business. For as little as $25, internet users can lend to individual entrepreneurs through crowdfunding. Kiva has collected funds from over 1.7 million lenders and has provided funds to over 2.6 million borrowers, with an incredible repayment rate of more than 96 percent. Rather than charging interest, investors receive a percentage of the company’s revenue to repay the loan. According to the Kiva website, “hundreds of thousands of these borrowers hail from conflict zones, farms, and the least developed countries.”
Looking at Kiva’s website, its loans are organized by category, such as loans to women, for education, to refugees, to farmers, and with research-based impact. Intrigued, I decided to loan $25 to Kennedy Kariuki in Kenya, as he needed to raise $600 to add a rickshaw to his motorcycle fleet business. The process took about two minutes and I am looking forward to seeing how things go!
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