Digital Entrepreneurial Charity, Solidarity, and Social Change

Introduction

The nascent field of microcredit is growing rapidly and attracting increased attention from many sectors. There is something inherently attractive and appealing about microfinance and increasingly new stories as KIVA. These extraordinary people, who started helping others after the seminal work carried out by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus, came up with brilliant ideas, and against all the odds, succeed at creating new products and services that dramatically improved people’s lives.

We can define KIVA as a collective movement based on solidarity and generosity with the final scope of achieving social change based a new entrepreneurial movement. As a result, we have analyzed as a background the principles of microfinance as a way of alleviating poverty, but also for impulsing social change derived from:

• 1.

  A financial approach and the banking of poverty

• 2.

  An increasingly used Digital Space and its Internet-based Peer-to-Peer Micro-lending

• 3.

  An entrepreneurial-based approach based on solidarity

• 4.

  Organizational dynamics

• 5.

  Virtuous Approach

As a result, and using this in-depth study, it has allowed us to focus on Kiva.org or the Social-on-Linezation of poverty.

Can KIVA experience and success be applied to other NGOs? What is the impact of ICT on microfinance? What are the advantages using Joint Liability Lending? To answer these questions, the objective of this work is to analyze how the strategy and the good results obtained in KIVA can serve as learning from practice to other NGOs pursuing similar goals. Our work begins describing the theoretical background that exists on this issue. Then the model of KIVA’s loan cycle will be described to analyze the impact of the digital space through this case study. Finally, future research directions and conclusions will be added.