Kiva

Kiva lays claim to being the world's first person-to-person micro-lending Web site. Founded in 2005, initially to support lending to Ugandans, Kiva today has a global footprint that includes the United States.

In the first four years since Kiva was online the organization connected nearly 600,000 individual lenders with more than 253,000 micro-entrepreneurs for loans that combined exceeded $100 million. Of loans made with Kiva's help to a total of nearly 145,000 individuals, 82.64% were to women entrepreneurs; the average loan size was $404.10. The current repayment rate on Kiva loans is 97.88% across all field partners, Kiva reports.

Kiva began offering loans to American micro-entrepreneurs in June, in partnership with ACCION USA and Opportunity Fund, a California-based MFI. As partners, these organizations vet, approve and disburse loans to individual borrowers; then they upload loan information to the Kiva site. Once Kiva lenders complete funding of a loan (typically $25 at a time), the organization aggregates the funds for disbursal to the lending MFI which uses the money to fund already disbursed loans.

According to Kiva, small businesses represent 87% of all businesses in the United States, and on average these micro-enterprises create 900,000 new jobs every year. Yet, many of these businesses are shut out of traditional credit markets – about 10 million by Kiva's reckoning.

50 million American households are considered "unbanked" - they have no relationships with federally insured financial institutions