Changing people's lives one loan at a time
Clint Schaff interviews Matt Flannery, CEO of Kiva.org.
A few dollars in the U.S. can be the investment that changes a person's life in a Third World country. That's the idea behind Kiva.org, a crowdfunding project that wants to change the world -- by teaming up micro-lenders with entreprenuers in countries with struggling economies.
Matt Flannery, co-founder and CEO of Kiva, began developing Kiva.org in late 2004 as a side-project while working as a computer programmer at TiVo Inc. The 27-year-old He and his wife, Jessica, started Kiva the business in 2005, turning a personal Web site into an organization that changes lives.
Kiva, a word that can loosely be translated from Swahili into “agreement,” works with entrepreneurs in developing countries, hooking them up with local microfinance institutions. Kiva.org allows lenders to see pictures of the entrepreneurs, and read how each plans to use a loan, along with blog updates from entrepreneurs they’ve sponsored.
Match microfinancing with crowdsourcing, and you have crowdfunding. Three years later, Kiva has connected more than 65,000 micro-lender with about 9,000 entrepreneurs in developing countires through “loans that change lives.”
Clint Schaff: So you co-founded Kiva? Who else is involved?
Matt Flannery: We have 12 people on our team in San Francisco. Kiva started about three years ago as an idea. Jessica, my wife, and I started a project in eastern Uganda. That project got picked up in the media, and in the blogosphere specifically. I had to quit my job to scale this job from a project in Uganda into microfinancing worldwide. Kiva has almost 70,000 lenders. Ten percent are from Europe. Ninety percent are from Canada and the USA. Most are Caucasian Americans who watch Frontline (a PBS show which aired a piece on Kiva). The lenders are thirtysomething Americans all across the political spectrum, and generally are wealthy and white.
