China 
Africa 
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Alternative Currencies and Place-Based PCE
Published in Boyd Cohen, Post-Capitalist Entrepreneurship, 2017
Kiva 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.” I consider Kiva part of the gift economy because Kiva and its network do not offer interest on the loans provided by people like you and I. It is kind of like a gift that keeps on giving because the loans are offered to microentrepreneurs in the developing world. When the loans are paid off, the lender can choose to keep the money in the Kiva system lending to other microentrepreneurs. Kiva claims to have a 97.1% repayment rate across the 82 countries where it works and has served more than 1.5 million individuals.
Collaborative consumption and the remaking of local resilience
Published in Steffen Lehmann, Robert Crocker, Designing for Zero Waste, 2013
By comparison, Kiva’s website describes it as ‘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’ (www.kiva.org). Kiva’s website also defines and discusses ‘microfinance’: Microfinance is a general term to describe financial services to low-income individuals or to those who do not have access to typical banking services. Microfinance is also the idea that low-income individuals are capable of lifting themselves out of poverty if given access to financial services. While some studies indicate that microfinance can play a role in the battle against poverty, it is also recognized that is not always the appropriate method, and that it should never be seen as the only tool for ending poverty.(www.kiva.org)
Borrowing or crowdfunding: a comparison of poverty alleviation participation modes considering altruistic preferences
Published in International Journal of Production Research, 2021
Yanju Zhou, Jie Zhang, Yumei Zeng
However, poor farmers often lack funds, and banks often are reluctant to lend them money or offer higher interest rates, which restricts their development of agriculture. Fortunately, in recent years, the crowdfunding poverty alleviation mode (hereafter the crowdfunding mode) has emerged and received much attention worldwide. Crowdfunding is an important innovation in microfinance that is increasingly giving the poor access to banks. A notable example is Kiva, which has ambitions of microfinance, that is, of facilitating financial access to the poor: ‘Kiva's aim is to make microfinance, which is basically loans to some of the poorest people on the planet, easy’ (Asongu and Nwachukwu 2018). Many crowdfunding platforms (e.g. JD Crowdfunding and Zhongchou.cn ) use their platform advantages to help the poor raise production funds and sell pro-poor products. For example, in 2018, JD Crowdfunding and Tencent proposed a new poverty alleviation project named ‘social + crowdfunding’. Since then, JD crowdfunding has supported 298 crowdfunding poverty alleviation projects (Yan 2018). Crowdfunding poverty alleviation refers to the act of helping the poor out of poverty by raising funds, preselling products, and seeking industrial assistance through internet crowdfunding platforms. In this poverty alleviation mode, poor farmers first initiate crowdfunding projects and financing needs through crowdfunding platforms, and then, they organise production according to market demand. Finally, these pro-poor products are directly distributed to consumers after harvest. Hence, crowdfunding poverty alleviation can be regarded as the presale of pro-poor products, which help poor farmers solve their financial problems, eliminate market uncertainty and broaden market channels.