Kiva Matt Flannery and Premal Shah Fellowship Awarded 2007  Kiva (www.kiva.org) is the world's first person-to-person lending marketplace for the poor. Kiva's goal is to reduce global poverty by creating a platform where internet users can lend to and connect with a specific developing world entrepreneur online. Affordable capital helps low income entrepreneurs start or expand small businesses, creating a path towards economic self sufficiency. Kiva enables a new channel for the delivery of such funds and creates equitable partnership relationships in the process. Kiva was started after a trip to East Africa sparked an idea in the minds of Matt Flannery and his wife Jessica. After observing how growing a small business could drastically alter the lives of low income entrepreneurs, they desired to personally start businesses with several people outside of Tororo, Uganda. Something personal grew into something larger that eventually found a home on the Internet. At about the same time, Premal Shah, a product manager at PayPal, was similarly inspired while sabbatical in India and consulting in microfinance. After posting up a small loan application on Ebay, Premal became an early pioneer of internet microfinance. Premal and Matt connected over the concept, built a model to scale it and a new movement was born. |
