Jessica Jackley Biography

Jessica Jackley is the co-founder of Kiva.org. A few years ago Jessica Jackley heard a speech by Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, an economist from Bangladesh who had developed the idea of microcredit: loans offered to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans, this prompted her to resign from her work and come to Africa. By late 2005 she co-founded Kiva.org alongside Matt Flannery. Kiva uses a peer-to-peer model in which lenders sort through profiles of potential borrowers -- be they a farmer in Cambodia a pharmacist in Sierra Leone or a shopkeeper in Mongolia -- and make loans to those they find most appealing. The minimum loan is $25, and the interest rate is 0%. The repayment rate for loans is more than 98% Jackley says and since the group was founded almost 700000 people have pledged $128 million in loans to more than 325000 people. Jackley's latest project is ProFounder a new platform that helps small businesses in the United States access start-up funding through community investing.

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