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We briefly examine some literature that challenges the received view on the overall value of microfinance and consider some implications for Kiva and conclude by noting that in the current market, Kiva will need to draw on its corporate history of innovation if it hopes to maintain its position of leadership in the face of new organizations like Acumen Fund and One Acre Fund that take different routes to the same goal of reducing poverty.

Kiva is the world’s first and largest crowdfunding platform for social good with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. By lending as little as $25, anyone can help a borrower start or grow a business, go to school and realize their potential. Since 2005, Kiva and its growing global community of 1.7 million lenders have crowdfunded more than $1.1 billion in microloans to over 2.9 million entrepreneurs in 85 countries, with a 97 percent repayment rate.

Today, we’re proud to introduce a new look and feel for Kiva, and a new, mobile-responsive website that makes supporting small businesses around the world easier than ever.

When Kiva began in 2005, we had a simple goal: to connect borrowers who need small amounts of capital to improve their lives, with lenders who want to help.

Kiva’s grown into a true global community, where people come together to support and believe in each other. That's part of the story we hope to capture with our new imagery.

Jason has over 20 years of executive product and general management experience helping early-stage and growth-stage companies build and deliver innovative products and experiences. Prior to Kiva, Jason spent 7 years at Minted. There, he led the Product Management and Design teams after running Growth, Digital Products, and Customer Operations. He began his career at Yodlee where he eventually led global engineering and custom products, then moved on to establish and lead the product teams at Lift Media and Extole.

Neville Crawley, Chief Executive Officer, Kiva Neville joined Kiva as CEO in the fall of 2017. He brings nearly 2 decades of experience leading global business and technology ventures, most recently as the CEO of Quid, a platform that analyzes the world's collective intelligence to help answer strategic questions. During Neville’s career he has worked in China, Nigeria, Brazil, Malaysia and across the Middle East, including 4 years working for McKinsey & Company and as the publisher of China Economic Review. Board member since 2017

Kiva is a non-profit lending platform well known for its microloan service targeted underserved markets globally. Lendio states that the program has now provided over $500,000 in microloans to business owners worldwide, 98% of whom are female. Lendio first launched the program in 2016. The company describes the program as part of its commitment to entrepreneurship and inclusivity. Lendio provides a microloan to a low-income entrepreneur for every new loan facilitated on its marketplace platform. This voluntary employee-contributed, employer-matched program reports a 94% participation rate among Lendio employees.

While refugees need immediate humanitarian aid, of course, they generally struggle to find work or start a business over the long-term. That’s, in part, because financial institutions usually won’t lend to them. The fund also will be the first institutional investment opportunity from Kiva Capital Management, an asset manager slated to launch as a subsidiary later this year. The organization describes it as "impact-first", that is, returns will be concessionary.

The former chief executive and co-founder of nonprofit lending platform Kiva.org, Matt Flannery, on Wednesday revealed his latest initiative Branch International Inc., which he calls “a mobile-based microfinance institution for the world.” Branch raised $1.4 million in equity seed funding from Formation 8 and the Khosla Impact Fund. In many ways, Branch operates like a bank in the cloud, one that is accessible not through local “branch” offices, but through a user’s smartphone. It provides small amounts of credit--up to $20--to Android users in Africa, specifically Kenya today, but doesn’t take deposits.

Since its founding ten years ago, Kiva’s micro-lending platform has helped entrepreneurs in emerging markets borrow $788 million from average Joes in increments as little as $25.

Omidyar Network will match up to $2 million of online donations from individual Kiva lenders. Amy Klement, Vice President, Investments at Omidyar Network, will join Kiva’s board of directors.

Kiva will use the funding to further develop its technology platform, expand its network of field partners, and continue to invest in due diligence and monitoring capabilities across its growing portfolio. The commitment, which marks the largest grant in Kiva’s history, reflects Omidyar Network’s focus on bringing microfinance to underserved markets as well as catalyzing social impact through technology.

The club’s decade-long KIVA lending portfolio exceeded $83,000 last week. KIVA is a micro-lending organization. Of the total loan value of $83,150, about $12,000 has been collected via loose change cups at meetings; the rest is comprised of paybacks, with interest.

All but one of the seven loans – typically of $100 each – were made to individual entrepreneurs in construction. To date, the club has made 849 loans in 72 countries. Just under half of the loans have been made to agricultural endeavors, another 20 percent to manufactures and construction, followed by food production. Fifty-five percent of the recipients have been women. 

Kiva, a nonprofit founded in 2005, has chosen to make Waco a “Kiva Hub,” the first city in Texas to receive such a designation

He welcomed small business needing a loan up to $15,000 to contact Startup Waco, headquartered at 605 Austin Ave.

The Waco City Council gave the local Kiva Hub a financial kick-start, awarding it a $50,000 grant. Passavant said he hopes to approach individuals and foundations about putting additional money behind Kiva.

Kiva has been awarded $2.5 million from the W-GDP Fund at USAID in an effort to identify innovative approaches to catalyze commercial investment for women’s economic empowerment and equality.

The Kiva Capital team will use this innovative funding to launch a comprehensive fund design and structuring process. This will include the development of an impact framework and a shared learnings platform.

At Kiva, we are constantly working to reach new countries and communities, with loans that better serve the needs of borrowers and their families. Kiva lenders crowdfund an average of $2.5 million in loans each week, creating a unique, renewable pool of funds that is reshaping access to financial services around the world

Kiva receives a broad range of support from a diverse set of corporations and foundations. From discounted services and free software, to grants and financial backing, Kiva is grateful for each partner that helps us achieve our mission of expanding financial access to help underserved communities thrive. (Please note that the corporations and foundations listed have made contributions of either grants, loan funds, equipment or services in the last 30 months.)

As of October 2017, 81% of Kiva's loans have been made to women.[19] Kiva emphasizes supporting women because women can gain the most from microcredit. Patriarchy and a strict division of labor still dominate the societies of many developing countries, and women often suffer the most from poverty because scarce resources are often allocated to a family's males, rather than its females.

he “Kiva.org: Crowd-Sourced Microfinance and Lending Team Cooperative Behavior” study focuses on evaluating the extent to which Solidarity as a design-lever impacts social behavior. Looking specifically at Kiva.org as a prominent community for peer-to-peer lending, this study seeks to evaluate the advent of “Lending Teams,” their subsequent impact on group lending behavior, and the extent to which group openness, size, and categorization substantively alters online cooperative behavior.

Microfinance practices were originally developed in offline contexts. Modern microfinance practices were based on development models for the financial and social empowerment of the poorest of poor in developing countries. Several of these practices drew from existing traditions of money lending within local communities that were reformed to be in sync with rural development and the empowerment of the underprivileged individual. In present ‘postmodern’ times, microfinance providers are using online tools in the hopes of broadening the reach and extending the advantages provided by such a model of micro-lending and micro-borrowing. In this article, we examine an online peer-to-peer lending and borrowing website, Kiva.org, which uses online social networking tools in microfinance. The study is thus a close look at the actual content of the website with a view to understanding the representational practices of online space through Internet mediated microfinance.

The crowdfunding industry has emerged in the past few years as one of the most promising alternative financing options. Lending and donating operations accounted for 81% of the crowdfunding industry's $34.4 billion total funding volume in 2015. Kiva Zip, a prosocial program, created an online platform that provides 0% interest peer-to-peer loans and has features in common with lending and donating crowdfunding platforms.

This paper reports the results of a large-scale field experiment designed to test the hypothesis that group membership can increase participation and prosocial lending for an online crowdlending community, Kiva. The experiment uses variations on a simple email manipulation to encourage Kiva members to join a lending team, testing which types of team recommendation emails are most likely to get members to join teams as well as the subsequent impact on lending. We find that emails do increase the likelihood that a lender joins a team, and that joining a team increases lending in a short window (1 wk) following our intervention. The impact on lending is large relative to median lender lifetime loans. We also find that lenders are more likely to join teams recommended based on location similarity rather than team status. Our results suggest team recommendation can be an effective behavioral mechanism to increase prosocial lending.