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[img_assist|fid=2273|thumb=1|alt=Solutionary Women: Jessica Jackley Flannery of Kiva|caption=Photo via Jessica Jackley Flannery.]
Jessica Jackley Flannery is the kind of person who makes you feel at home right away, like she is truly happy to meet you, which is why I wasn't surprised when she said,
"Kiva started out of relationships and love, ideally I would love for that to be present in every single transaction that happens. People connecting."
Jessica is the co-founder, with her husband, Matthew Flannery, of Kiva, a nonprofit that is using the Internet to allow everyday philanthropists, like you and me, to loan money to budding entrepreneurs all over the world. She has worked in rural Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda with the Village Enterprise Fund, and Project Baobab on impact evaluation and program development. She is currently pursuing an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
You can watch a 16-minute documentary about Kiva on the FRONTLINE World web site. When the documentary aired on Ocober 31st, the response from viewers was so great that it brought the Kiva site down.
Below is an edited transcript of my interview with Jessica, which you can also hear on the Big Vision Podcast.
What is Kiva?
Kiva's mission is to connect people, through lending, for the purpose of poverty alleviation. The way we do that is by providing opportunities for individuals from all over the world to lend money to specific, real people, in pretty much real time, through our web site; and we do that by working with a number of microfinance institutions all around the world--MFIs.
We find entrepreneurs through our partner MFIs. The entrepreneurs are posted up on our site with their profiles and a word about their lives, their families, and their plans for the business and the money they are requesting. Lenders come to the site and lend any amount from $25 up, in increments of $25.
What is an MFI?
There are 3500 or so MFIs on record, but estimates go up to 10,000. About 70 percent of MFIs, or lending institutions, loan to fewer than 2500 people. There are a few that are a lot larger. There are also nonprofit ones; a lot of them start out as nonprofits and then slowly move toward financial sustainability, and they might turn into a non-bank financial institution, or a number of other kinds of forms along the way.
Microfinance, as a whole, is a big category of financial services for the poor: microloans, microcredit, is just one offering, and that is what Kiva focuses on. It is kind of the most well-known and most talked about, and oftentimes it is confused--people say "microfinance" when they mean "microcredit" or vice-versa.
How did Kiva start?
In the very, very beginning, Matt and I had this idea like, "How neat would it be if we had individual, real people on our web site with their needs, and the amount of funding that they need? I'm sure we could get people to help them and to loan money to them, so let's just try it."
We didn't actually have a specific organization that would work with us besides Village Enterprise Fund, which is a great non-profit. Shout out to them! They do microenterprise grants, not loans; but we worked with some folks that had been given grants and used those successfully, and basically worked with our friend Moses, who listed the seven businesses in the very beginning, put them online, and helped post the information about them. We put them on the web site and within just a few days our friends and family indeed did step up and loaned the money that was needed.
So, fast-forward a whole year. We work with a little more than a dozen MFIs all around the world who... let's take Kenya: say there is a head office in Nairobi, and maybe some branch offices in Kakamega or Kisumu, towns all around Kenya. In those branch offices are loan officers. They are the people that get on the motorbike every day, or take the bus, or whatever they do, to get way out to villages where their borrowers may reside. So they are the people that go and actually do the vetting, accept loan applications, do training if there is any--most of our partners do that--and actually distribute the funds, collect the repayments every few weeks, that sort of thing. So they are the people on the ground.
In the very, very beginning we were working with people like that, like the loan officers.
