Kate for Kiva!

Vital Stats

Kathleen B

people helped51
People Doing It 1

The Problem

Kiva.org is a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world. The people behind Kiva include volunteers, our board and a team of employees in San Francisco. But out in the field you can find Kiva Fellows like me! The Kiva Fellowship has given me a rare opportunity to travel abroad and witness firsthand the impact and realities of microfinance. Kiva Fellows are Kiva's eyes and ears on the ground, and we spend our time meeting with borrowers, uploading borrower profiles, and making sure that their loans really are "Loans that Change Lives." Without Kiva Fellows, all those photos and profiles you can see on Kiva.org wouldn't go up. Through our work, borrowers around the world are given a hand up (not a hand-out!) to expand their business and support their family.

Plan of Action

After spending four months volunteering for Kiva in Ecuador, I am thrilled to be re-committing to joining the 16th Class of Kiva Fellows this September in Peru. Through my work in Ecuador, I started the Kiva program with a brand new Kiva partner in Quito and made sure these people (http://www.kiva.org/lend?partner_id=190&status=All&sortBy=Most+Recent) had access to affordable microcredit, and were able to support their families and build their businesses. So what has my fellowship entailed? Eighty-one days. Forty-eight Kiva entrepreneurs. $38,175 dollars lent. Fifteen hundred Kiva lenders. One hundred and twenty-one days left. If I measured my time as a Kiva Fellow in numbers, these are the results. How many loans, how many dollars, how many x, how many y. But Kiva’s tagline isn’t “Loans that Raise Incomes on average by 32%”- it’s “Loans that Change Lives.” This is the intangible impact- effecting education, women's rights, and world poverty- of Kiva's loans. With Kiva in Peru, I will continue to meet and work with the entrepreneurs that apply for loans through Kiva, individuals whose own lives are changed by donations given by people like you, thousands of miles away.

Education Inequalities