Center for Social Innovation

Published: June 16, 2010 Download  40 minutes, 18.5mb, recorded 2010-01-29

Kiva empowers individuals to support international development via an innovative, grassroots philanthropy mechanism. By allowing people to lend money online to entrepreneurs across the globe — in increments as small as $25 — Kiva is creating a global microfinance community that deals in up to $2 million in loans per month. In this audio lecture, Kiva cofounder Jessica Jackley shares with Stanford MBA students in Professor Jennifer Aaker's class, "The Power of Social Technology" (PoST), the journey that led her to create Kiva, and the challenges and triumphs she has experienced along the way. In PoST, a new experiential class from Stanford Graduate School of Business, students learn to leverage social media for social good.

Jessica Jackley is a founder of Kiva.org. In just three years, Kiva, which means "unity" in Swahili, has helped raise nearly $100 million and connected thousands of people in 180 countries through peer-to-peer lending. Kiva is responsible for a loan every 12 seconds. Jackley has worked in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda for Village Enterprise Fund and Project Baobab on impact evaluation and program development. She also worked in the Stanford Center for Social Innovation to launch the inaugural Global Philanthropy Forum, and at Amazon.com, Potentia Media, the International Foundation, and World Vision. Jackley has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

A social psychologist and marketer, Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Her research spans time, money and happiness. She focuses on questions such as: What actually makes people happy, as opposed to what they think make them happy? How do small acts create significant change, and how can those effects be fueled by social media? Her research has been published in both marketing and psychology journals, and has been featured in a variety of media. She is the author of The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways To Use Social Media to Drive Social Change.

Resources

• Kiva
• In Microfinance, Clients Must Come First, a Stanford Social Innovation Review article
• Reimagining Microfinance, a Stanford Social Innovation Review article
• The Dragonfly Effect