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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.

Microfinance platform Kiva has proven many times over that people are willing to give $25 microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Now the platform is bringing its microfinance savvy to small business owners in struggling areas of the U.S. with Kiva City, a program launched this past June. The program has already proven successful in Detroit and New Orleans (the two launch cities), where 19 initial loans have been fulfilled by microlenders. That’s over $135,000 in loans.

African fintech startup Jumo has pulled in a fresh $12.5 million to add more fuel for its expansion into Asia Pacific.

Jumo specializes in social impact financial products, such as microloans, savings and insurance.

It started in Tanzania, and today claims to have originated more than $1 billion in loans.

JUMO builds its credit profiles using behavioral data gathered from mobile wallets, cell phones and transaction data.

JUMO is a transaction and predictive technology platform that partners with mobile network operators and banks to offer customers microloans and access to savings and insurance products. They are currently active in six markets – Ghana, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Pakistan – with plans to soon launch in India, Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria. JUMO has helped disburse over $1.6 billion in funding to small and micro enterprises, and has helped connect over 15 million people to credit and savings services.

Millions of people in developing countries depend on microloans to raise the funds to grow a business or just stay afloat in hard times. And thanks to digital platforms, smartphones and free-moving global capital, growing numbers of people in the rich world are using their money to lift others out of poverty.

But the reality is often a lot messier – something that may not initially be obvious to the lender. In fact, like Cabusog and Lendwithcare, borrowers and crowdfunding sites connect via local partner microfinance institutions (MFIs) who do the essential work of assessing creditworthiness and administering loans. To pay for that, most MFIs charge interest to borrowers, often at wildly varying rates.

Kiva is the slickest of the microfunding websites, offering a mind-bogglingly glossy catalogue of projects sorted into different categories, countries and attributes, all illustrated with backstories and pictures.

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.

So the service seemed like a win-win-win, and to an outside observer, its dual operations in the United States and Kenya appeared to be progressing smoothly. Kiva Zip’s senior director, Jonny Price, sounded upbeat when he wrote on NextBillion in April, “We’re excited by (Zip’s) potential to revolutionize the way that small business owners in America, and the wider world, are able to access microcredit.” Meanwhile, over the past four years, the platform enabled more than 8,000 lenders to make almost 10,000 microloans totalling a reported $1.8 million to more than 6,500 borrowers in Kenya alone.

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.

Kiva has promoted itself as a link between individual lenders in the developed world and individual borrowers in the developing world, allowing visitors to its Web site to learn about and lend money to people in poor nations seeking small loans for specific purposes.

the loans made by individual lenders through the Kiva site do not actually end up in the pockets of individual borrowers. Instead, those loans are aggregated and used to backstop microfinance institutions that have already paid out microloans to the borrowers featured on the site.

Kiva president Premal Shah said he could foresee a day when Kiva really did provide a direct person-to-person connection, once certain legal hurdles are cleared and as more individuals in the developing world began using mobile phones to access credit and make electronic payments. In the meantime, the organization has changed the wording on its homepage from "Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur, empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty" to "Kiva connects people through lending to alleviate poverty."

Heya- fawry is an initiative in collaboration with arab women enterprise fund, Baheya, AXA and unilever to empower women, increase their opportunities in the financial market and help them to climb up the financial inclusion pyramid in Egypt Fawry as the leading e-payment network in Egypt is supporting poor and disadvantaged women by training them to become Heya fawry-agents, providing POS machines offering them complementary micro-insurance coverage. Ultimately, this initiative will allow poor unbanked women to have access to life-enhancing financial services (mobile top-ups, bill payments, money transfers, microloan payments, as well as essential nutrition and healthcare goods) directly via their nearest Fawry’s agents to raise income for them and their families and to enhance the well-being of the society. Fawry’s main aim is “to ensure that women access our services in the same extent as men do”