Kiva.org: disintermediation as microloans
Kiva.org is an organization that focuses on making rural microloans. A microloan for these purposes is a smaller development loan, useful for buying, say, a couple of goats or a truck instead of a large infrastructure loan for buying schools or new highways. It’s useful on more of a personal level, and it’s a smaller need that doesn’t get served well by traditional NGOs. Kiva is a platform for these rural focused loans, with an initial focus in Uganda.
Why this is significant is that Kiva has managed to remove several levels of aggregation of loan in order to more effectively reach the people with the needs and the money, and to connect them directly. Removing layers like this is called disintermediation.
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