Kiva, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that crowdfunds loans for women, students and other underserved entrepreneurs, topped the $1 billion mark in financing female businesses around the world.
Kiva.org, its online platform, has granted the milestone microloans to more than 2.7 million women in 94 countries.
Kiva has offices across the globe, including Bangkok and Nairobi, and was launched in 2005 by Stanford University graduates Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley.
Since Kiva's launch, the nonprofit has crowdfunded loans totaling nearly $1.4 billion worldwide to men and women alike. It has a repayment rate of about 97 percent.
According to Neville Crawley, CEO of Kiva, the company would continue to promote financial inclusion to close the gender equality gap, and "seek and develop new ways to transform the financial and social systems to work better for [women]."
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Ganesh Natarajan is the Founder and Chairman of 5FWorld, a new platform for funding and developing start-ups, social enterprises and the skills eco-system in India. In the past two decades, he has built two of India’s high-growth software services companies – Aptech and Zensar – almost from scratch to global success.