Kiva.org is a website where you can make a loan to an entrepreneur who needs capital for their business or for personal use. For example you can make a loan to a student in Kenya who wants to attend college, or a fisherman in the Philippines, or a farmer in Nicaragua. When they repay their loan, you get your funding back. Kiva's goal is to expand options for poor people who are otherwise excluded from the formal financial sector and unable to access basic banking services, including credit, savings and insurance. Our mission is to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. We work with about 150 partner institutions in over 60 countries to fund their borrowers, since Kiva doesn't have the staff capacity to find and vet the thousands of individuals who appear on our website.
My job is to help find and monitor those field partners, to ensure that they are not only financially sound, but also that they are treating borrowers in respectful ways and offering products that are well suited to the populations they are trying to serve.